DREAMS of 2011 2 of 2
SATURDAY, 4/30/11: 5:10AM: Another dream with a fair amount of my having to drive a car, this time to find the locations of two raceways in which I'm supposed to compete, while, in the same locations, playing some kind of board game so that two of my skills are tested at the same time. A woman is with me, directing me where to go, a sort of combination of Susie and Mildred, and she looks back, as I come off a side road onto a highway, to see if traffic is clear, but I fear that I'm taking a lot of chances driving and am not really comfortable doing it. A presage of driving on the trip in France next month.
SUNDAY, 5/1/11: 6:12AM: Something falling in my bedroom wakes me with a jolt, from a dream that has a committee of people sorting through index cards containing names of natural and man-made wonders of the world, checked off if entered in a certain roster, and one site, like the Grand Canyon, is being passed around carefully so as not to disturb its rank or handling code.
MONDAY, 5/2/11: 6:30AM: A pilot prepares to fly in TOTAL fog to get out of an airport in which his girl friend is in danger of being seduced by another pilot there.
FRIDAY, 5/6/11: 7:35AM: 1) Carpet given to guy; I want some. 2) Father gives rules to son.
SATURDAY, 5/7/11: 1) 5:02AM: I'm vacationing in, maybe, Maine, and visit a Japanese hotel in which the top floor is constructed of enormous concrete blocks that don't quite fit together, so that I have to step down about four feet from one level to another, over a one-foot gap between two blocks that drops five stories to the ground: it's very nerve wracking walking around this top floor. One side-slit is pointed out as a urinal, another alcove contains a real toilet. Then I'm following a friend down a street past Victorian facades on shops, and he starts running, and I suspect it's 7PM and shops will be closing soon. I stop to take a picture of an arresting sight of autumn-bare branches of a tree above a mass of green leaves that the wind blows upward to form a silvery, shimmering screen, with a color accent of a red object caught on a branch to the right, but straw seems to have encased my camera, and I have to brush it out of the way to clear my lens for the picture, which I have trouble finding in the eyepiece. In a moment my attention is drawn to the faces of three teenagers trying to open a car door, and then a police officer describes one of them as "the youngest killer in the town's history," and I wonder if I've taken some kind of historic photograph. Confused "detaily" dream. 2) 8:39AM: Unremembered entireties, fragments remembered: something about lists, shards of streets lost, items colored, index difficulties, books incomprehensible; a concrete snippet of a book written about art by Jean-Jacques, starting from hand-written pages, corrected tables of contents, and galleys stapled at the top. GUILT for not remembering, and recording, more.
SUNDAY, 5/8/11: 7AM: I'm setting up a home for Pope Hill in which he can get treatment for AIDS by sharing an apartment with someone very important, who seems to be someone like Osama Bin Laden. I negotiate and manipulate, and finally it looks like I've succeeded, so I'm happy about that.
MONDAY, 5/9/11: 1) 3:03AM: A small group of us watch a sleek new German jet take off and fly low past us as we look over the ocean, and the plane suddenly follows a curve to fly upward and then curl down to crash into the sea. 2) 7:39AM: A) I'm in the lobby of an opera and hear the elevator operator say that we only need our ticket stub, so I throw three-quarters of my ticket into a vacuum-operated waste machine and discover that I've kept the PRICE stub, rather than the SEATING stub, and I don't know whether I'll be allowed in. B) I'm walking down a hallway past Michael Blackburn to an elevator, aware that I have my hand on my waist at my stomach paunch, and I want to look into the mirror when I get to my room to see how awful it would have looked to him.
TUESDAY, 5/10/11: 6:50AM: My leg hurts (burned?) and I mark clothes in thirds to iron and put on.
WEDNESDAY, 5/11/11: 7:08AM: It feels like I'm dreaming about something that had happened before and I'm setting up for a second experience of the same thing: bizarrely, going into the upper atmosphere in a balloon that supports a basket which is a few cubic yards of earth, in which a hole has been dug, and in this hole, two of us can be transported safely far above the earth: I keep thinking that the first time was a success, but this time I'm more aware of the construction of the "basket of earth," and I'm worried that we might fall through the bottom, to our deaths far below in the ocean over which the balloon has been soaring. But I try to rationalize that the earth has been removed from the base of a tree, and the tree's roots will hold the ball of earth secure even with our weight in the hole, which only goes about six feet into the twelve cubic feet of earth in which the hole has been dug, so that the bottom IS in fact secure enough to maintain our weight without allowing us to break through. Another oddity in dream-life.
THURSDAY, 5/12/11: 9:14AM: Don O'Shea and I am in an Actualism office so that he can type some page that he needs, and as we're leaving, someone I knew from before sees me and tells me that I've got FIVE BOOKS out from the office, and I say I know nothing about them. Later, Don and I are following a parking-lot attendant (obviously at Caramoor, in Katonah, about which I'd just read in The New Yorker) who leads us down a long road to a place to park for a show we're going to see in a nearby outdoor theater, and I say, snottily, "We've sure passed a lot of emergency parking places already."
FRIDAY, 5/13/11: 7:24AM Note: A woman is crumpling my "reminder" Social Security card and shouting, "It's not MY kind of card!" Why??
SATURDAY, 5/14/11: 8:20AM: I'm walking in thick cottonwood-tree fluff, and fear that I might be inhaling it to cause damage to my lungs.
SUNDAY, 5/15/11: 5:10AM: Exciting dream of reading for a part in a play, with a large group of people who are entranced by my improvisations, and the director LIKES me, and starts correcting me, and the others sat and spent time with me, making me feel just GREAT and wonderfully accepted. Wake almost ELATED.
MONDAY, 5/16/11: 1) 2:46AM: Odd dream of my picking nuts out of a young friend's candy snack in a movie theater to see how well the big almonds or little filberts go with something (chocolate?) I was testing for "chewability." 2) Someone has NAILED (maybe that tapping entered my dreams?) my blue jacket above an outdoor urinal to prevent rain leaking into the men's john in a picnic area in a park. I press up against the wall to pee without dribbling on my pants, at the same time looking outside to see who's passing by in the park. I feel angry that my jacket, not very waterproof anyway, now has a nail-hole in the middle of its back!
THURSDAY, 5/19/11: 8:57AM: First, I've entered a basement orgy area, and immediately get entwined with two participants, one of which has his leg posed in the air in such a way that I'm able to tickle up his calf to the hardened heel of his foot and tease him into laughing. Later, I see there are empty easy chairs along one wall, and I sit to watch a group of black-cowled men act as a kind of Inquisition for others in the party. Then the police enter, and I'm glad I'm wrapped in a flowery robe, with my shorts on underneath, so that I can't be accused of public nudity as some of the others can; but the "raid" is innocuous and I see a tiny notice at the bottom of page 2 of the Times the next day that the "police visited a private party." Without transition, I've gotten off a train with what seems to be the same group of partiers, and when I ask where we are, I'm tossed a folded map that shows a lake funneling to a point at a town called Bilderberg, where we are to board a boat for an excursion on the lake before we continue overland to our night's hotel. I'm concerned that I may have left my shirt and jacket at the party last night, but I root in my shoulder bag and find both of them, somewhat wrinkled, folded up, and I wander the shoreline looking for an out-of-the-way place to dress for the boat trip.
FRIDAY, 5/20/11: 5:13AM: I'm on a bus to some small town in Westchester, but decide to ride to the end of the line to see what's there, but it starts getting dark and I ask how long to the end of the line. "Twelve minutes," says the lady driver. "And when do you return?" "Tomorrow afternoon," she replies. "Not tonight?" "No, it's too far." "How can I get back tonight?" "I guess you can get a cab in Compton Eliot." "No, he can try just north of here," says a young man who hears my question. "Thanks, kid," I say, hoping I'm not insulting him by calling him a kid. It's now completely dark outside and I can't see anything anyway. Unfortunately I haven't seen any taxis at all.
SATURDAY, 5/21/11: 1) 4:50AM: A radio station announcer proclaims, "We should all record out dreams!" 2) 7:51AM: I'm walking down a line at a breakfast cafeteria, facing many little items: eggs, pancakes, bacon strips, omelets, fruit, and I think to make it simple by asking for "one of each," but one of the clerks points out that one of the egg dishes has bacon ON it, so I have to be more specific, and I think they should really make a MENU of choices numbered maybe 1-5, so we need only say the number and get what we want without having to specify each particular item.
SUNDAY, 5/22/11: 1) 4:28AM: Maybe on a television program there's a guy obsessing about having sex with his SISTER, and, in the dream, I think, "What's so WRONG about just having intercourse with her, so long as you're sure you won't have a BABY from it?" People are so TRADITIONAL---yet the Egyptians did it all the time! 2) 6:54AM: Incredible dream of Lina Marks looking like her usual, older, dark-haired, pallid self, and then suddenly turning to present her alter ego: a Mohawked range of yellow hair standing up on her otherwise shaved skull, with contact lenses that make her eyes a brilliant blue, and I'm surprised that I never noticed she had such a split personality. There was much MORE to the dream, but I forget it now that I'm typing at 1PM.
MONDAY, 5/23/11: 1) 3:20AM: A short Concorde flight in France ends, but I can't find my camera bag under the correct seat, and have to walk a long (lost) way to try to find it. 2) 7:43AM: Visions of people sliding down twisting slides, like water slides, and with many other details that I've forgotten now at 8:45PM; really SHOULD have transcribed this when I got up!
FRANFOOD TRIP DREAMS
FRIDAY, 5/27/11: 4AM: I'm rehearsing a script in which people's names are used in such a way as to cancel each other out in their race to see whose name is used first, or most often. William and Bill are considered the same name. It all seems very important.
SUNDAY, 5/29/11: 8:34AM: Wake with two dreams: 1) I'm going through some of my old storage boxes and come up with two packets of old porn photos that I haven't seen in years, and I figure to take them to my bedroom and see which can still excite me, and maybe enjoy a long jerk-off session, but then wake and realize I'm on a trip with Ken, and that won't be possible, and feel very disappointed. 2) I'm attending some kind of psychological "happening" in which a large group of people are gathered in something like a high-school gymnasium, with stadium seating in some parts, and folding chairs set up in other parts. Some of the attendees are merely audience to see what kind of interviews or confessions are being offered by different groups of misfits, crazies, or compulsives who are devoted to various deviant behaviors or attitudes. It seems that there's no central program: maybe it's up to the viewers to ask provocative questions of the deviants to get them to act out, or confess, or cry, or ask for help, or to demonstrate their craziness---so it's a confused and confusing mix of voyeurism and self-help and acting-out, and viewers move from position to position hoping to get the "richest" or "oddest" or activity which is most tittilating to the individual viewer, whether it be sexually, sadistically, masochistically, or weepily self-castigatory. I move around, not wanting to really participate, but hope to encounter something particularly interesting and unique, just in order to take advantage of this unusual gathering. It may even be in a place like a high-school auditorium in Akron, which would make it, somehow, an even more unusual happening that it would be if held in some major center like New York City. I'm eager for something exciting to happen to witness, but reluctant to cause anything on my own for fear that it might not be within any guidelines for the encounter, though the idea seems to be "the wilder the better." Wake sorry that I'm not actually there. Type in the john to 8:51AM, hearing noises from downstairs, feeling guilty about not yet having started my journal on this fifth day of my FRANFOOD vacation. Nose running, uvula sore and swollen and dark red, tired from walking yesterday, not quite awake after more than eight hours' sleep.
MONDAY, 5/30/11: 1) 2:45AM: I'm sitting in a kind of church pew for a writer's class, and I propose that I'd like a woman to help me write something, and the two women to my right volunteer, saying they'll meet me at a certain corner in half an hour. I show up and they don't. Later, another woman shows up and asks me which of two wigs she should put on first: the first is gray-haired and small, and if THAT goes on first, it'll look like she really NEEDS the second wig to cover it up; the second is dark-haired and long, so if THAT goes on first, the other will really not cover it up and REALLY look like a wig. The question of whether she should even WEAR a wig never comes up. 2) 6:45AM: I'm working with many other typists in an office in which new typewriters are being tried out, and there's much discussion about what type font will be used, arguing about the looks of certain letters in certain fonts, but toward the end of the discussion it occurs to me that ONLY the bottom line of letters has the letters actually on the keys---all the others are BLANKS. "How can I type when I can't see where the characters are; do YOU know exactly where the dollar sign is?" No one else seems to take up my plea, and I wonder if I'm going to lose my job because I can't type on a keyboard that doesn't have ALL the letters on it! Wake feeling totally incompetent.
TUESDAY, 5/31/11: 6:11AM: 1) A number of singers are trying to finish singing difficult passages in order to qualify for a special prize. They're not competing with each other; they're moving themselves into greater areas of competence, and it appears that the greater number of successes make subsequent successes easier, so it's possible to coach each individual to her own accomplishment, and the hope is that THIS is the season in which the few dozen who have yet to make it will "cross the finish line in triumph," and a new era of musical mastery will be firmly achieved. I can almost hear the pieces that each must sing successfully. 2) A soprano past her prime has been hired to boost a particular product with her singing of a single arpeggio that soars higher and higher until it climaxes with a clear, pure, on-pitch high-C, and as she practices again and again, going smoothly and purely higher and higher, the final note is attained with breathtaking richness and sureness, and everyone is so thankful and grateful that it seems a stirring event in the history of sound production by the human voice, and my connection with it seems to be taken as part of the unified actions to make it possible; a very gratifying dream, as again I seem to hear the cadenza clearly in my mind before I wake and transcribe the dream to 6:18AM on this last morning in May on my FRANFOOD trip.
WEDNESDAY, 6/1/11: 1) 1:27AM: A group of us have just had some kind of training in Africa, and we're divided into competing groups to summarize what we've learned. I figure it's going to have to be about some dangerous sessions we had in fragile boats on rough lake-waters, but we were just asked for five words to write on a blackboard, surrounded with four lines that represented the pages of a book, and were told that we had done very well, and could now go home. Somehow the dream ended with Spartacus and me going home on a Sunday morning and him saying that his Times would be delivered later that morning, and my saying that I hadn't thought he was having it delivered at all. 2) 7:53AM: ENDLESS dream of indexing a sort of bibliography of sources for an extremely long book, where dozens of "No 10" references are the only things to be indexed for text that includes lazy sex scenes with some slutty woman doing pointless seductive practices to no particular end, with hundreds of "notes" that include only the most fragmentary names, notes, or dates from what look like the address labels of New Yorker magazines, but all for the same cover. Marj is helping me in this endless task, trying to be helpful, while I try to be tolerant of her frantic efforts, and I can't figure how any of this is going to mean anything in the book I'm indexing. Again, it's hard to communicate the length of time that the dream seemed to occupy, as the thickness of the pages, the quantity of the typing, and the repetition of the data was pointlessly endless. Wake after almost TEN hours of sleep, almost numbed by the hours of inactivity since I peed (1:34-7:53).
THURSDAY, 6/2/11: 7:50AM: Barbara Kahn and some others from Village Playwrights are agitating for some kind of work change, or maybe a strike, and I'm looking on as if I'm not at all interested in how it turns out.
FRIDAY, 6/3/11: 6:06AM: Four of us are living a workshop-life together, me and Marj and someone like Ron K. and another person who could be a man or woman, and I feel I'm somehow "important" in that what I choose to talk about, or with whom I choose to interact, will determine the direction of the spontaneous improvisation for this session. I'm slightly self-conscious (as in Ken's and my conversation last night about the self-consciousness of the young waiter, contrasted with the "consciousness of self" of the spatulate-thumbed waiter who I described as "knowing who he was, and delighting in BEING that, rather than concerned about his RIGHTNESS in being that."), but as everything we say is being wisely recorded to keep track of the "jewels that we utter," we feel that we can say ANYTHING, no matter that Marj feels that Ron isn't getting his proper stage-time, knowing that it can be EDITED for maximum impact at some later time, maybe even by a dramaturge who isn't one of us, but has an unerring ear for what will captivate an audience. This could go on in a self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing, way, but I have to add that in another moment, dream-wise, I'm screwing my fingers around to an excrescence on my lower back, hoping that it's a pimple ready to burst rather than a tag that should be left alone, squeezing with hoped-for precision so that I can feel the desired worm of pus being expressed by my surgically-accurate fingers, and wake to "hear" the theatricality of my dream-thoughts, but wanting to record them as quickly and precisely as possible, as I finish peeing, my nose dripping, my feet cold, hoping that Ken doesn't AGAIN choose this very moment to loom behind me in the bathroom, demanding his moment on the toilet, now that it's 6:16AM, already light out, and I'm done typing.
SUNDAY, 6/5/11: 1) 4:48AM: I'm looking with horror down from a hill near 58th and Fifth Avenue to see tigers and lions escaped from the Central Park Zoo attacking other animals in the snow: it seems a heavy snowfall wrecked the cages and all the animals are roaming free. In a moment, there seems to have been an Actualism event planned in the area, and I encounter [God, can't think of Bernice Cousins' name for ten seconds] Bernice waiting on line for the event, and ask her if she's seen what's going on. She seems more surprised to see me than she is by hearing what's happening, though she somehow connects Actualism's importance in being there with the events. Then, from another viewpoint in Central Park itself, a number of witnesses are looking at silhouettes of large rabid dogs pursuing cats up the slanted trunks of trees, and we can actually see a large chow-type dog bound upwards and gulp down a toy dog of some breed in three consecutive gulps, and everyone's horrified to see such brutality with such clarity, bringing out cameras and other recording devices to capture the grisly details of the scene. Heavy snow lies everywhere, but it doesn't impede the viewers of the carnage, nor does it seem to impede the meeting that will take place, nor the fact that I seem to have been one of the first to discover this particular story, as various students shout my name, "Robert Zolnerzak said...," "It's Robert Zolnerzak..." and "Robert Zolnerzak," which makes me feel quite good and think that maybe this will somehow make me famous in a local way. Vaguely surprised, in the dream, about the conflict between my egotism and the weird, "dreamlike" is the only appropriate description, of the events taking place in Manhattan before our eyes. 2) 9:21AM: I'm squeezing my perfect erection around its base, glorying in the literal convex pool of precum on the head, which looks a bit like the slits on the pierced slices of banana at dessert last night that Ken refused to admit looked like a meatus. Again wake with intense sexual feelings, looking forward to the day at home on which I can cum, and fall back to sleep.
MONDAY, 6/6/11: 8:46AM: I'm returning on a boat like the Staten Island Ferry from an Army assignment somewhere, and after a few minutes off the boat I realize I left my open shoulder bag, filled with my stuff, on the boat. I find that I have what looks like an old gold-colored subway token needed to make a phone call, and call the Ferry company to try to see if they've found my bag. Feel frustrated that I've messed up again, lost something again, and hope I can retrieve it before the next step of my Army career.
TUESDAY, 6/7/11: 3:42AM: I've missed a doctor's appointment in which I was supposed to have picked up a renewal of my prescription for some serious-disease medicine, and I'm in bed at 1AM at home in Akron when the phone rings, waking my mother, who's in her 50s, and my sister, who's quite young, and my mother demands to know why he couldn't have called at a more reasonable time, like 11AM, but I knew I hadn't been available at a reasonable time yesterday when he might have called me. Then I had to order a dozen, very unsightly, oranges for my condition, but when I put them on a kitchen shelf, I find four oranges on one side of the sink and maybe eight others on the other side, and I wonder why it was I had to have more oranges in the first place.
WEDNESDAY, 6/8/11: 8:38AM: Odd dream fragments of having to go to various side-places from some central hotel; John A. involved in some of them, Ken in others. Wake intermittently with feelings of dread, and of sleeping too late and missing breakfast.
THURSDAY, 6/9/11: 3:42AM: I'm in some kind of drawing class, and some student drew a fantasy picture of Brad Pitt kissing him, and pencilled in a cartoon issuing from Brad Pitt's mouth, saying, "Oh, I love you so much," and I have a brief fantasy that he was really saying it to me. Another half-remembered fragment included a group of people gathering to watch a movie that had been shown on a tiny video screen high on the right-hand wall of a stage, and I wondered how the image was going to show to a real audience on the proper movie screen that filled the back of the stage.
FRIDAY, 6/10/11: 1) 3:36AM: I'm in a kind of commune with about a dozen other people of all ages, and we've all competed in a contest to write the best story or poem, and I've won. In looking over the comments that have been written about all the works by all the competitors, I'm impressed with the obvious facts that 1) "These people like me; they really LIKE me" and 2) Many of the comments are truly intelligent: they're not just empty flattery, they're observant, critical, and discerning in their reasons for liking and not liking the other entrants and entries. I feel privileged to be part of this group. Looking back into the dream, there's a feeling that this is a retired group in Florida, even though they include some younger people, even though there's more of a California sensibility about many of the comments: they're frankly interested in the commercial possibilities of the pieces, and one or two even volunteer to publish or finance publication of a hundred copies or so of my works, which also pleases me very much. Could this be a fantasy of a kind of future fan-club for my website? A dream that left a glow with me as I got up to record what details (many forgotten) that I could remember. 2) A repeat of a now-familiar dream: I'm going to perform my solo just after the first intermission of a number of groups, and follow a guy to the admissions desk who ALSO says, "I'm one of the performers" and is admitted free. A sexy interlude intervenes: I'm in an orgy room, and the very handsome young man to my left, however improbably, accepts my arms and legs near him as he interacts more strongly with the guy on HIS left, but I reach to his upper thigh, and upward to his taut ball-sack, and then the hard ridge of the underside of his cock pressed upward against his stomach, and I squeeze the shaft just as it spasms again and again in orgasm, and I reach up to hold his cum-drenched cock-head as he allows me to gently rub his orgasm to a more-felt climax. Then I return to the part of the dream where I'm dressing in whatever kind of costume I have for "my act," and then "Ken's voice" interrupts the pattern and I go pee.
SATURDAY, 6/11/11: 1) 6:28AM: I'm given a list of color-coded prices, like 99.6E, 2.3F, $7.50, and, like in a game, combine them to buy deeds to various goods. When the tokens are taken, they're not available any more. A group of us seem to be playing. 2) 8:48AM: THE most strange dream: I want to see a new movie, but the movie house interior is divided into a number of sections, some of which are reached by a funnel of red stairs that get smaller and smaller as you go down, until you're sliding down a slope to an unknown end. Then there's no main screen, but a bunch of TV screens suspended from the ceiling, pointed at strange angles over bunches of grouped theater seats, most of which are empty, so you really can't tell what to do. I sit in the third row, but suddenly everyone sits in front of me so I can't see the screen. I move to another section, sit on the side, and three muscular guys sit right next to me, and the guy to my left says "Take your arm away" menacingly when my arm wasn't anywhere near his. I decide to move again, and it's not really a movie theater at all, but a multi-purpose amusement park, as I see groups of people preparing to get water-skis and get into lines of boats roped loosely together and go down into a flowing stream. I take my shirt off so it won't get wet, and hope my wallet in the back pocket of my jeans won't let my money get wet. Try to find an empty seat in the first few boats, but they're all full. Finally a boat comes past with only three kids in about six seats, and I figure I can at least go through the ride, but then the character of the ride changes, and I'm on a shore looking down at elaborate cliffs and caves underwater where kids and adults are snorkeling. "I like that," I think, and look to get a snorkel mask, but strange people standing nearby look at me as if I'm speaking a foreign language when I ask where I get my snorkel mask, and finally a trio of nodding, rubberized heads turn in my direction, and I ask again how I get a snorkel mask, and one red-headed woman's head replies, sarcastically, "You have to button it to your wet suit," which I obviously don't have. "How am I supposed to know all these things?" I ask, expecting at LEAST to hear, "Well, you have to go through a few times to learn what to do," but what I get is a third rubberized, obviously not human, head, that nods and says "Vodka is alcohol," and it's JUST too crazy so I wake to realize it's a dream I'd better record before I forget how really crazy it was.
SUNDAY, 6/12/11: 7:41AM: Hard to sleep in cold from A/C and sweat from duvet, but take stuffing out and doze to see a pattern that I think of as an E in red-only mympths, and then after a bit a kind of gentle rain of yellow-only mympths, rather strange.
MONDAY, 6/13/11: 7:55AM: 1) I buy a $1 joint and start smoking it with pleasure, and then see another exhibit where an enormous doobie is featured with a special blend. I ask how much it would cost, and the seller puts it onto a scale, does some calculations, and comes up with $18.50. It's expensive, I think, but it'll probably be worth it. I buy it, light it up, and start puffing prodigiously away, getting some of the paper at the far end burnt off, and about halfway through I'm not sure I'll ever make it. 2) I'm trying to demonstrate how Antarctic ice breaks up by breaking a hole in the ice that covers my bed, but when I feel the ice cracking, I realize that I'd better take the covers off first, or they'll get wet, AND the viewers won't even be able to SEE the patterns of the ice, so I start ripping off the brown blanket to see that a large central part of the sheet beneath has already become wet with the water in the hole in the middle of the ice. Tear off another sheet, and there's another thin sheet beneath, even wetter with a dark hole of water that's expanding, and I'll never be able to explain the difference between brash ice and bergy bits now, and I feel the whole thing has failed, and now I have a bed that's too wet to sleep in.
END OF FRANFOOD TRIP DREAMS
THURSDAY, 6/16/11: 4:33AM: Dennis has come over, and he's dressing for dinner in my living room, tying his shoelaces, and I'm vaguely curious over the fact that we haven't even kissed hello yet. We're about to leave when I look out the front window, which seems to look out over yellow-grass fields, and there's a head of a man sitting on a bench outside, so I go out, wondering who he is, and on THREE benches are three or four men, one of the Uncle Edward, interspersed with a few dogs, cats, a horse, and other animals, and I REALLY wonder what's going on here: have they come to arrest me and Dennis for being gay? Is there some legal situation of which I'm not aware? Just what's going on here? And it's so strange that I wake and type dream, and then pee, wondering if I have the slightest fever from taking two Imodium earlier in the evening.
SUNDAY, 6/19/11: 3:50AM: I'm in a foreign country---or maybe even on a different planet---being given a tour of the aircraft in a hanger, and I'm given to understand that the peculiar star-shaped jet engines reconfigure during flight, so that the two-dimensional head-on look of the lights that outline the front of the engines change into a three-dimensional spiral, when in operation, to create a unique kind of lift and thrust. I feel honored to be given such a prestigious tour when I'm merely a visitor to their installation.
WEDNESDAY, 6/22/11: 8:15AM: I'm living with my mother and some other people in a multi-room apartment rather like my house at 1221 Dietz, and for some not-clear reason all of the books on the shelves have to be arranged. At first I try to decide whether to keep my traditional separation between fiction and non-fiction books, or to combine them all into one alphabetic order. Then I decide to ask my mother which sections of bookcase will remain where they are, and thus possibly keep the books they have already, many of which fit neatly in sets on shelves which accommodate them precisely; and what major changes will be made in the rooms which will necessitate drastic movements of groups of books. "Well, for one thing, you'll be getting a twin bed and lose your big queen-size bed," she says. That's not ANYTHING like what I had in mind, and I'm so astounded that I can't really think of a ready answer, except a loud, mental "NO!" I just, in the dream, think there must be a better basic solution.
THURSDAY, 6/23/11: 1) I'm cleaning the sides and bottom of a small swimming pool that's gotten a strange, green-particulate crud clinging to them, not quite knowing what tools to use rather than my fingernails, and my boss doesn't seem to care how I do it as long as I get it clean. 2) I'm on vacation in some large Chinese town, shopping with two women from the tour, and we're making sweeps through cheap discount shops, exiting one, and I notice a yellow-marqueed Zum-Zum across the street, but they assure me they've been through it before and there's nothing there that wasn't in the shop we're just leaving, and though I'm tempted to take a look anyway, I decide to just follow them back to our hotel and forget about more bargain-hunting.
FRIDAY, 6/24/11: 1) 5:03AM: I'm giving people six egg sandwiches in plastic cups, and then cutting myself a ham-salad club sandwich. 2) 7:22AM: I'm in a huge group getting into cars and vans to go to a picnic upstate, and I'm in and out of rooms trying to find someone to go with, or reserve a seat next to. Then I get lost, wander streets, trying to find a bus to take me to---I don't even remember the name of the village: I'm just lost, lost, lost.
SATURDAY, 6/25/11: 6:26AM: I have good sex with a female prostitute; as part of Group A, where Groups B-D have to be moved in cars to get out of a tight parking lot.
MONDAY, 6/27/11: 1) 6AM: I'm looking for my house keys in a bag filled with travel stuff, and I lift everything off the bottom of the bag and tip it to the side---and no keys slide out. I've lost them! 2) 8:09AM: I'm waiting in a three-person line to use a Xerox machine, but when I'm next, the guy who'd finished in front of me takes an attachment off the top of the machine and moves it to another place, and when I look around, there are three unused regular machines waiting to be used, and I'd been waiting in the wrong line.
TUESDAY, 6/28/11: 6:14AM: I'm heating old cooked rice and small bits of tomato and meat on a gas burner shaped like a lantern, on which is a slab of wood with a hole on which I center an old pot, hoping the wood doesn't catch fire before the food is heated; this is on a massive porch while I'm reading a green-covered hardbound book.
THURSDAY, 6/30/11: 1) 1:59AM: A panel that includes many characters from Village Playwrights are conducting phone surveys, and they have begun getting responses from people with whom they'd only been able to leave messages with before. Someone like the cute young blond---Gunther Schmidt? (HA)---answers a phone and hears that it's John Vinton. He gasps and drops the phone in his lap with a suppressed smile on his face. "Who is it?" "John Vinton." "Oh." More suppressed smiles. I say something like, "Well, whatever, we've got to handle it," though no one really seems to know how to do that---or why it is we find the situation so laughable. 2) 6:31AM: I have to clean an apartment like 1221 Dietz, but in a country setting, and make sure that shelves long undusted are cleaned, and I take great care with outside sills that have an accumulation of sod and leaves on them, brushing trash to the ground below, and finishing up outside just before I have a meeting to attend, happy with what I've managed to do. 3) Walking down a Village street on the way to check something at a store-front Actualism center, I pass Maya Bryant, looking smart in a blue suit trimmed in white, and she's done some new art-work that I seek to compliment with "Plus ca change, c'est plus la meme chose," and she smiles tightly at me, saying nothing, and when I nod to her, urging her for a reply to my "charming" statement, she purses her mouth even tighter, without really losing her semblance of an agreeable smile, and utters, "No-ish." I'm taken aback, but maybe she's right that she took it as a criticism of her work, which I thought had not changed when she thought she had improved, and politely stated her disagreement with my assessment. I continued to look for the recessed storefront on a street crowded with little shops---a street I'd never seen before. 4) 8:21AM: Like Ale is going to the Museum of Natural History, opening at 10AM this morning, he and a friend are talking about visiting his father in some kind of institution that opens at 8AM, though the friend insists that the GROUNDS are open at 6:30AM, and I ask, with some incredulity, if that means you could meet the person OUTSIDE at 6:30AM, but not be allowed INSIDE until 8AM? He looks at me as if I'm crazy.
FRIDAY, 7/1/11: 7:40AM: Long, discursive dream: a group of what may be indexers (we're nerds, not a social group) are gathered in Central Park, and somehow we're mobilized to remove an enormous wrecked door from a public area to a place where it might be burned, or at least moved to a less-public area. We somehow get that done, which energizes us to tackle a couple of large dead trees, some of which have fallen, some of which are still standing. We start by massing 8-9 people against a still-standing tree, and have an easy win when it topples without much effort. We move it somewhere, and tackle some smaller pieces. The dream gets more definite when 4-5 of us tackle a wooden piece that resembles a workhorse, and somehow I end up at the end which is going to the top of a hill, and when I look down the other side I realize I have no idea where we're going, and drop my end to say that the person at the other end should, first, know where we're going, and second, lead us there. After a moment of dream-transition haziness, we're in an office building, having lost our burden, but still looking for some kind of directions. An older woman glances at the corporate logo on our floor, HGW, and decides it must stand for H.G. Wells, and tries to find someone from the company to find out what "H.G. Wells" does. We're through the entry into a lobby, where we're urged to be quiet, and we sit in a row of reception-area chairs, where one of the receptionists whispers something in my ear that I simply cannot hear, nor can my repeated requests that she speak louder result in my understanding what she wants to say. Other discursions occur after this central image, but now I'm more awake than asleep and sort of rambling, unknowing, as part of a group which has lost its purpose. Decide the dream has gone on long enough and put on the light to transcribe it to 7:51AM. Decide to pee and get back to bed for another hour or so.
SATURDAY, 7/2/11: 4:50AM: I'm in a kind of classroom in which a group of us are given Styrofoam sheets with which to create new forms, and I come up (with a Zolnerzak?) with a three-dimensional form of great simplicity, elegance, and beauty: it's a sort of step pyramid in four layers, and I can't imagine how the bottom layer is now, though in the dream it was intuitive, maybe four trapezoids that formed a frustrum of a taller pyramid; atop those, four more smaller trapezoids for the second level; the same kind of thing for the third level; and the fourth level was comprised of three triangles making a pyramid on the top of a larger, four-level, pyramid. Everyone admitted that "it was a winner," and that it deserved world-wide recognition, and, needing a name, the Zolnerzak was proclaimed, and I was very pleased. It seems, now that I've typed the core of the dream, that there was some subsequent part that I've now (had mistyped, interestingly, NOT) forgotten.
MONDAY, 7/4/11: 1) 6:03AM: Odd fragment of boy of 12 not being able to stay in movie in which he was cast as BEING OLDER. 2) 8:46AM: Nude woman gets covered with paint and runs "splat" against a canvas covering the lens of a video-camera filming the process.
TUESDAY, 7/5/11: 8:46AM: Mom comes home to my apartment, again very like 1221 Dietz with a dining-room table filled with piles of stuff that I've yet to put away, and I crow about the wonderful pages for the index I'm going to do, and though I've sorted things out into neat piles, I look and can't FIND the pages to show her how wonderful the book is. Wonder for an awful moment if I'd taken them somewhere ELSE and LEFT them there by mistake. Mom's in her 40s, looking quite professional, as if she's in some kind of business of her own which required her to be away on a long weekend ON business.
THURSDAY, 7/7/11: 4:50AM: Alphabetically backward parking is described for small-town orgy in local auditorium---one person has just cum, the second person is getting ready, and the third is leaving, and everyone's PRIMED.
FRIDAY, 7/8/11: 7:42AM: I'm one of the leaders of a new organization, and the originator of the idea is reluctant to share his responsibilities with me: he has a greeting card that he MEANS to present to me at some later time, but he's already handed it to me and I make a point of NOT displaying it, as he's displayed cards that he's gotten, until he actually PRESENTS it to me, yet he MUST be aware that I've seen it, and I maliciously try to make it as obvious to him as I can that I know he doesn't want me to acknowledge it until he sees fit for me to do that. Also, there's a small area on charts that's used as an area for planning, diagramming the position of items on a stage, for example, or the arrangement of floats on a street, or the placing of luminaries on a stage, all indicated by simple marks on the middle-bottom of an index card. This is one of the major duties of the head of the organization, and it's not clear to me whether he's already given me the responsibility for this duty or not. He seems very new to the concept of delegating authority, about which I know more than he does, and he knows that but doesn't want anyone else to realize that. I enjoy making him feel awkward about our relative positions and authorities.
SUNDAY, 7/10/11: 9:28AM: 1) Probably influenced by the black tar on the sidewalk in front of 75 Henry's rear entrance that Spartacus walked around while I walked through: a janitor tried to clean up an enormous black-mud area on a tiled floor in what seemed to be a school, but the mud hadn't dried yet, and much couldn't be scrubbed off because of that. Later, when I passed by, I bent over and scraped at the edge of the black, and it came away cleanly as a dried powder, and I thought to leave a note for the janitor NOT to use water, but just scrape the powder off and the spot will be gone. 2) Someone is making a guess at a quiz board, and the master of ceremonies is giving a hint: "You have only 8 and 12 to choose from." The contestant tends toward 8, and the master of ceremonies actually tells him what I and the rest of the audience know to be the best choice: "Take 12." But he still hovers above 8, and I feel so strongly about it that I say aloud, "Listen to him, take 12." The contestant then seems to move toward pushing 12, but I wake up.
TUESDAY, 7/12/11: 1) 5:43AM: I'm looking at the distant outline of a village street on the horizon, and note that there's a small fire in what I think had been a grocery store. Then the fire gets larger, flames shooting into the sky, and we wonder what could be the cause, fearing some kind of larger import from the event, and at the end, there's a cataclysmic eruption of gas and flame, like a grayish oil-well geyser, soaring beyond the limits of our vision, and we tremble at what may happen next. Then we're walking on a muddy hilltop, fearing to slip off the summit to one side or the other, again fearing this is only a prelude to some earth-shattering event. We mutter about possible catastrophes. Later the horizon turns dark, just a cliff against a slightly lighter sky, and someone shouts, "Look, there are SEALS up there," and, sure enough, lumbering silhouettes, first one, then many, lurch across the skyline. Subsequently, a whole ZOO of smaller animals appear: ducks, birds, small mammals, large rodents, and again we wonder what this might portend. It's as if creatures from another dimension are impinging on our own. As if to verify that possibility, a group of us are in a strange room, looking at a human-like couple studying mathematical papers on a kitchen table, and the woman looks behind her back, vaguely in our direction, saying, "I think there's someone here?" in a frightened tone, and someone in our group says, "Duck, they think they can see us," and as we stoop below her range of vision, she turns back to the table, as if satisfied her idea was mistaken. 2) 8:15AM: I'm looking at a shelf full of brochures that describe warning events, but I'm not sure of the order in which about seven packets of these brochures should be arranged. I'm pretty sure about the first and last, and think I can identify the fourth, though I'm not sure where the line between the second and third is, and whether their relative order is correct. They all appear to predict world-ending disasters, though I'm not sure if they record the past, like my trip brochures, which they resemble, or predict the future, which would make me fearful about them. Some remnants of the terrors of the first dream linger over my seeking to order the packets of pamphlets.
WEDNESDAY, 7/13/11: 7:28AM: I'm looking for something to do, and end up in a kind of video library searching for a movie that I've seen before and liked, so I can watch it again. Watch something with George Segal, but it's not the movie I thought it was, so I'm looking for something else. Then I think to go to a place like Plato's Retreat, where I see a straight couple go to an adjacent bed and start to have violent, perfunctory, missionary-position sex, and am more turned off by the unfeelingness of the act than I'm turned on by its eroticism. Then I think of a gay bath, but I fear being rejected for my age and pot belly, yet I'm turned on by the thought of observing orgasm-nearing masturbation. Wake feeling vaguely erotic, but too cold with the air conditioning on.
THURSDAY, 7/14/11: 4:40AM: I'm exchanging "funny money:" "For 1 penny, a chicken will bite you. For two cents, you can cross on a red light," and someone gives me a handful of coins: one euro, two ten-cent pieces, and a small ticket.
SUNDAY, 7/17/11: 5:13AM: I'm listening to old vinyl records of Radio City Music Hall programs from the 40s and 50s, and Carolyn is amazed by the audience laughing at old jokes, between musical numbers, and I calculate that in 1940 she would have been 7 or 8 years old, and she's amazed to hear them.
MONDAY, 7/18/11: 1) 2:25AM: Rita sleeps on the platform before the subway comes, but when I call her, she's GONE! 2) 5:29AM: Dream of quoting a bishop in a murder trial.
TUESDAY, 7/19/11: 6:34AM: A Giamatti-type guy is meeting an old friend and trying to re-establish a friendship. "New phone?" "Yes." "Give it to me?" "No." And then guy tries to recall church, a hospital, and a group, and other organizations now gone.
FRIDAY, 7/22/11: 5:34AM: I'm climbing a rocky path along old pipes, seeming to be the only one interested in turning on antique fountains which spurt up, the opposite direction of the 9/11 memorial, which cascades downward.
TURKEAST DREAMS
FRIDAY, 7/29/11: 2:22AM: 1) I'm playing a word game where the first letter of the last word of a dialogue has to be the first letter of the FIRST word of the next bit of dialogue, Like "John said." "Said subject is..." 2) Someone like Dennis is describing the thrill he gets when someone cums on him, particularly attractive couples, yet I insist that he has all eyes for the orgasm of the guy, rather than the girl, and he smiles lasciviously and agrees with me.
SATURDAY, 7/30/11: 12:46AM: 1) Fragment of seeing two photo captions that can be merged into one, and some advanced computer graphics program produces the desired results that I seem intuitively to know how to accomplish. 2) A quick montage of naked male bodies flashes past: a pale male jerking off, a group of men interacting, and finally, and most erotically, a tanned Spaniard curves his body upward from a body below his which is having an orgasm, and HIS body's cock begins to shoot, and I have an overwhelming desire to reach down and clutch his spurting penis. 3) Another fragment ends with a buzz rather like an alarm, or a phone ringing, that wakes me.
SUNDAY, 7/31/11: 1) 12:52AM: Ultra-dramatic dream with three surprise twists: A) Character A did what everyone thought Character B had done; B) Character B had done what everyone thought Character A had done; C) Character C had done what she had vehemently denied she had done, but when she turned to confront her accusers, another, inhuman, force revealed her lie: her dress had caught on fire, and, rather than trying to put it out, she defied the pain and turned to insist on her innocence, but all the while the intensity of the fire increased, so that her denial of the pain of the fire became a confession of her guilt: and in her determination that no one discover her guilt, she consumed herself in fire, killing herself in order to try to convince everyone of her innocence, but, by doing so, created the complete opposite: the conviction that only her guilt could make her so determined in her actions that she sacrificed her very life to attempt to uphold her lie, revealing her lie in her attempt to conceal it. What an ultimate dramatic twist! 2) 4:58AM: I'm at my desk at IBM when someone who looks rather like Jesse Eisenberg (the guy who played the Facebook originator in "The Social Network"), from whom I'd commissioned an INDEX of an odd assortment of four documents: an old "Amazing" magazine, two newspaper articles from the New York Times, and another magazine rather like The New Yorker. He returned the documents with scant markings, withholding the index itself, and presented me with a bill that was a work of art in itself: a cartoon of the Bill Elder (?) type with frenetic scribblings indicating the work he did for the index, with a pink square somewhere near the center with "4 hours @ $25/hr = $100" printed on it, and I would have been pleased if this were the final amount, but there was so much ELSE on this little masterpiece of a drawing that I feared some other hidden charges that would increase that. Each document was indexed separately, and I recall looking first at the index for "Amazing," which was in a boldface type of about 15-18 single lines with a single page number, which seemed very appropriate. The rest was a mish-mosh of formats and pages that I couldn't quite interpret, but which I assumed was as close to what I'd specified (which specification I had absolutely no memory of) as I could desire. He sat uncomfortably, chatting for over half an hour (for which I wondered if he wanted to be paid), partly excusing and partly ingratiating himself. Then someone across the room seemed to know him, and he called back that she'd matured wonderfully, and she responded by praising his improved appearance through the years. Then he met two strange women, dressed in black and spangles as if for a Halloween party, and he praised their choices of apparel, which flattered them, though I couldn't really see the point to what he said. Then I looked in my wallet, when he said he wanted cash, and found I had a $50 bill, two $10s, and some singles, making it close to $80 and I said he should excuse me as I went to search for someone in the office who knew me well enough to loan me the balance (bizarrely, against collateral of two travelers' checks that I happened to have in my wallet), but I couldn't find anyone I knew in their offices. Somehow I knew he wouldn't want me to send him the rest through the mail, and I didn't know how it would turn out when I woke, feeling almost ill.
MONDAY, 8/1/11: 1:09AM: I'm sorting strands of what might be beads, or strings of playing cards, coming from a source which hides the number of strands, but since it seems to be related to Spider, there might be ten strands which I try to tweak and merge and bind and decollate to put them in order so I can FINISH sorting out these strands. But it goes on FOREVER as strands merge, progress is lost, new strands appear, old strands get tangled; I think possibly to "cut to the end," but just can't do it, telling myself it's "somehow worth it" if I can see it through to the end. And it continues on and on to the point of nausea. It may even be a slight delirium from fever?
WEDNESDAY, 8/3/11: 12:52AM: 1) Forgotten melodramatic confrontation between two men over who loved a third man more. When I first woke with the dream, details of the arguments remained in my memory, but though I now try to recall them, all I can remember is my self-important thought that, if developed properly, it would make a dynamite play. Typical megalomaniac feeling. 2) Someone is carrying a quantity of contributions to the funeral of a famous writer (who seems to be me, since three of the contributions are simply marked "Robert Zolnerzak"). A former friend is asked what HIS contribution would be, and his response is one of aloof disdain, as if it insults his former love to ask for anything from his former love. Other contributions include art-works, manuscripts, and deeds to properties or securities. It seems the deceased was quite an important person, no irony intended. 3) 2:47AM: I'm at a teller's window in a bank, and have more than one transaction to perform, but a simple deposit seems to have a new form that asks for information I don't know, so I just put in my name and address where appropriate and hope that works., amid all the other cards, stubs, forms, and pieces of paper. A dignified teller leaves his post, and at one point a midget appears, smiling up at me, saying, "Someone will be handling your account shortly." Then, to my great embarrassment, it turns out that another transaction involves the printing of my computer-memory sections, and I see all kinds of dreams and journal entries scroll by as people get increasingly impatient behind me, and I can't WAIT for the scroll to end. "Ordinary" frustration dream. 4) 4:41AM: I'm trying to buy something like a phone card, or CD, with a credit card, but there's a problem with the transaction, and I'm supposed to meet my mother on the east side in a restaurant whose address I don't even know for sure. Dash from place to place inside the building, stopping to ask other clients, "Are you driving to the East side?" Of course no one replies. I keep trying, it gets later and later, and finally I figure just to give up; Mom will eventually return to our hotel room, I'll explain why I couldn't get to her, and we'll have to live with it. ANOTHER frustration dream. Does this say something about this trip?
THURSDAY, 8/4/11: 1) 2:50AM: A melange of fragments, including: a) ordering encyclopedia articles according to alphabetization and space available on a page, b) looking at photos that have been misplaced on pages, so that one photo folds over to reveal that two have been joined by mistake to appear side-by-side when they should be on different pages, and c) a discussion about my respect for Madame Curie as a scientist and devoted worker, ending with my shy admission that I also partly respect her because she is, of course, Polish. 2) 6:32AM: I'm in a hotel lobby sorting things out in a public area, and bills of different sizes and colors slip out of my wallet onto the floor near the chair in which I'm sitting. I kneel on the floor and other small items spill out of my pocket to make the pile on the floor more confusing. I pick up what look to be outdated instructions or warranties, and think that these should be in my suitcase rather than in my pocket. Think that the small purple rectangles are foreign currency, but realize that some are also instruction slips for some gadget I just bought, and think that I first have to sort the pile on the floor into what goes into my wallet and what goes into my luggage. Get off the floor to turn on a lamp nearby, but it won't turn on. I look around the lobby to see if other lights are on, and, seeing they're not, think that there might be a power failure. Other items are suddenly mixed with my stuff on the floor, and I DEFINITELY think, "Oh, if only this were a dream, I could just wake up and not have to take care of any of it; but it's NOT a dream so I just have to handle it," and as I determine not to get flustered, I wake up, relieved that it WAS only a dream.
FRIDAY, 8/5/11: 12:07AM: 1) Dream of snippets of Jack Lemmon in drag that may or may not be in William Wyler's "Some Like It Hot." 2) Shit, I can't remember the second one now! 3) 3:51AM: Sweet, seldom-repeated, always treasured dream of being in a summer camp for young men, two or three of whom are sleeping together in the same bed in attitudes of closeness, trust, and love, their young bodies freely entangled, arms wrapped around each other in youthful pre-guilt abandon. I enjoy looking at them, and then decide to go out later in the evening to see what movie might be playing at the Gem Theater of earliest Akron days, enjoying being both old enough to be out on my own, and still young enough to be accepted at this pubescent camp where testosterone has yet to make adolescents cruel and suspicious. Edenic innocence!
SATURDAY, 8/6/11: 1) 3:50AM: Three items are "standard" in printing out a page; the last one being the last line on every page, but I'm not quite sure how to incorporate this easily on my new computer.
SUNDAY, 8/7/11: 1) 3:24AM: After a few unremembered snippets, this seems worth recording: I'm finishing a trip with a little woman who's a combination of Helen Mirren and Siggy from this trip, and we'd been friends on the trip, but AFTER the trip, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, I meet her dressed very elegantly and say "Hello!" with some surprise, but she seems not to remember me, or WANTS not to remember me, and walks off with a very tall man who's like an actor whose name I don't remember, who played one of Harry Potter's maybe-good maybe-evil teachers in some of the middle films. I feel mildly put out. 2) 3:30PM: I'm looking out the window of Grandma's house on Hartford Avenue when I see my mother walking home from work at 5:55PM. Either I was supposed to have picked her up at 5PM or I was supposed to have been somewhere else at the time, but I knew she would be annoyed, yet amused, that I saw her passing at that time. Without transition, I'm being forced by Winston Churchill to get a haircut, but I keep insisting that my mother (again!) wouldn't want me to get it cut at all, but as he digs into the hair at the nape of my neck with a pencil-thin electric razor, I keep insisting, "KEEP IT SHORT!"
MONDAY, 8/8/11: 2:25AM: I'm a member of a young boys' group, one of whom is a healer. I have the signs of becoming a healer, which means that I have to pick off a particularly large scab and suck on the pus that lies beneath it. I do so, revolted by the softness of the scab and the difficulty of breaking the skin around it. A feeling of revulsion through the entire, brief, dream.
WEDNESDAY, 8/10/11: 1) 4:02AM: Dr. Freilich is operating on me, but in a very strange way: he starts by holding his hands around my head in a way that I can only conceive of as an elaborate taking of my pulses, a way to determine my health and present status and condition for the upcoming operation. Then he raises my right arm over my head and attaches something---at first I think he's putting in a needle, but it doesn't hurt---to the side of my chest, which I guess must be some kind of monitor. I don't know the purpose of the operation, but it seems to have something to do with my heart, even though he's a dermatologist. I feel confidence in his competence, but I wish I knew more about the procedure he was about to undertake. 2) 5:15AM: I'm sorting through my kitchen cabinets to see what kind of pre-packaged food I'd brought back from China (sort of a Healthy Heart program I'd subscribed to in the past): lots of yellow-labeled packets with brief descriptions of what sort of dehydrated or to-be-heated foods were inside. Lots of the packets were merely quantities of rice that came along with the other nutrients, and I thought of how nice it would be to have the additional cabinet space when I finally finished eating all this food that I'd gotten in the past, hoping it wasn't past its expiration date. 3) 6:10AM: I'm watching a TV program, sort of a cartoon, of wires being twisted when some appliance on an airplane is being manipulated, and it's clear that the wires are going to break and cause a short and be the cause of some kind of accident that the program never shows. 4) 6:11AM: I'm talking to Joan, who's VERY elegantly dressed in a tailored-to-fit pink silk dress, saying that only SHE would be the type to shout "I will NOT keep quiet" in a library, "Particularly if the attendant pissed you off," I say, trying to be funny, but she assumes her vaguely annoyed face and turns away, refusing to answer me.
THURSDAY, 8/11/11: 4:04AM: I'm staying on what appears to be Fire Island, and two of us search for breakfast, order it, eat it, and then someone sits next to me and makes idle talk, mentioning something to his right, and he fondles my cock. I reach over and he's soft, but gets quickly hard, and I work him back and forth only a few times before he starts juicing, and then cums copiously in my hands. I enjoy it, and tell him he's quite a load. He smiles at me and says *I* am quite a load too, which is nice since it's been a LONG time since I heard anything so nice. Wake mildly aroused to the sound of a call to prayer.
SATURDAY, 8/13/11: 5:51AM: [First dream in ages what would benefit from a diagram!] I'm looking at the position of a little shop next to a movie-theater box office. Both are set back from the property line, so there's extra space available, but both the box office and the shop want more interaction space available to it: making the shop bigger would limit the waiting-line space in front of the ticket office window, but leaving adequate space in front of the ticket office window would limit the access to the shop, and the owners of both can't decide how to resolve their dilemma. I'm trying to help, but no easy solution presents itself.
SUNDAY, 8/14/11: 3:51AM: Disturbing dream: I'm riding up to a bus stop and Dennis, waiting for me, in an impulsive, loving, move, throws his body and arm out as if to stop the bus, but he does so too close to the bus, and a policeman standing nearby possibly uses TOO much violence to push him out of the way of the bus before it stops, and I get out to find him lying on the ground, nursing a bloody lip, eyes closed in pain, trying not to cry or be angry with the policeman, who looks on angrily: not even HE seems to be sure if he acted in protection or in anger, TRYING to hurt Dennis. I'm sad and disturbed.
END OF TURKEAST DREAMS
TUESDAY, 8/16/11: 1) 1:47AM: I'm looking at the contents of a computer guide, and see that I can watch some explanations at any time, with a long list of components that are explained starting on page 2, and this makes me very pleased. 2) 4:55AM: Obviously influenced by Audrey Hepburn's fashions in "How to Steal a Million" seen on the plane on Sunday, I'm looking at a TV production featuring dresses, and an actress resembling Ava Gardner appears first in one dress, then in another, some inappropriately elegant when filmed against the poor Italian village streets, and finally only a series of semi-transparent gowns appear on plastic mannequins standing strangely in the streets.
WEDNESDAY, 8/17/11: 6:43AM: I'm working as a maintenance person at a Disneyland-type amusement park, wearing a green uniform over my regular clothes, and when I turn in my uniform, which I can see packed away in a cardboard box and put into a kind of truck to be carted away, it occurs to me that I left my locker key in the jacket pocket---as I put my suitcase key in my trousers on a trip. I tell my boss about it, but they don't seem to want to do the simple thing of looking in the most recently deposited boxes, and they imply that I've caused them a lot of trouble by not keeping my key with me instead of leaving it in my uniform.
SATURDAY, 8/20/11: 7:42AM: I'm visiting a doctor's office in India for a noon appointment, but there's no one in the office and I have to shit, so I find the bathroom and sit on a strange bicycle-seat toilet that conducts my wastes down a blue chute into a red hole. I shit very liquidly, which takes a large number of smooth toilet-paper squares to clean up, and I'm suddenly aware that two people have come into the office, and even into the bathroom, where one man stretches out on a cot, and a woman disappears into another office; she might be the doctor I've come to see, but I'm worried because now it's close to 1PM and I have to get all the way across a large town to my hotel from which my next tour leaves at 2PM, and I fear I might not be able to make it, rather forgetting that I haven't even seen the doctor yet, fulfilling the reason for which I came to this office in the first place. I feel acutely embarrassed in my current situation.
MONDAY, 8/22/11: 7:47AM: I'm attending a conference on some new-age guru, and for a few minutes I'm lying in her bed, thinking that she might find me a possible partner in some way, but she continues to sleep, and without transition I'm sitting at a table with her husband, who seems to be trying to capitalize on his wife's fame and reputation, and I don't particularly want to be associated with him, either. Then I'm in a larger group, attending some kind of "morning session," which seems to include a screening process for those who would be accepted into the afternoon session. I don't intend to attend, but at the end of the morning I'm handed a number of slips, tokens, and notes that imply that I WOULD be welcomed back if I chose to return, but I'm thinking that I'd be happier studying the source material itself, rather than getting involved with an est-like cult being established around the persona, rather than the teachings, of the guru.
THURSDAY, 8/25/11: 5:30AM: Four couples (TURKEAST trip?) are involved in a week-long project to "compute a work of wart," to be judged on art qualities and PHYSICAL POSITIONS at the end.
FRIDAY, 8/26/11: 5:01AM: I'm waiting in line for confession in church, and then I have to go outside for the path to get to the john.
SATURDAY, 8/27/11: 3:22AM: [From saving water for hurricane last night:] I'm doing LOADS of laundry in two small and one HUGE tub, in PUBLIC, throwing clothes in, then adding soap liquid from plastic bottles, seeming not to have enough for the quantity of clothes, and thinking that I could pour the contents of the two smaller tubs into the large one to make one batch which I could moosh around with my feet if I needed to. And then I had to think about water for rinsing, though there seemed to be a hose handy for that.
SUNDAY, 8/28/11: 7:16AM: I'm living in an apartment on the third floor of a building more like 167 Hicks Street, and I'm standing in my bedroom in a shower of asbestos-like particles from a section of my ceiling that seems to have dropped to reveal an apartment upstairs which had never been used, but now housed a dormitory in which over a dozen men were sleeping. I was astounded to see this, and went down to the ground floor to find a reception desk, like in a hotel, surrounded by people who didn't speak English, but appeared to be immigrants from some middle Eastern country like Israel or Palestine or Lebanon. I kept trying to find someone who spoke English, but I just went from room to room to find that some had been converted into playrooms for children, others into a kind of church or synagogue with services going on, and others just sitting rooms for many more foreigners. I know I'd been away on a trip for a few weeks prior to this, but they appeared to have settled in over a period of months, and I was puzzled about how I hadn't noticed any gradual change, but it was just an accomplished fact that I really didn't care for at all, but there appeared to be nothing I could do about it. Reminds me, now as I type, rather like the hurricane going on outside that I "didn't invite in" but which is going on without my permission.
TUESDAY, 8/30/11: 1) 5:55AM: I've just left some errand south of 14th Street in Manhattan, going north to my grandma's house at 167 Crosby, where Uncles Edward and Henry and Aunt Helen are waiting in a car for me to take them to---Grandma's?---house. I remember being in deserted hallways, where I'd brought some packages (like the fur coat Robert Taylor was taking for his mother as she "died" in a German concentration camp and he had to get her out in her coffin before she died), some of which could be left, and some of which I had to take to the car to be taken to Grandma's---and Henry was GOING there, when I decided that I was also going there, so I could drive him at 1PM, and his other siblings joined him, and I said I'd be right back, but as I walked, I lost where Crosby was, and asked some passerby, who pointed to the street name on a Manhattan-green sign at a triangular intersection where I would have tended to take the slanted, east-tending street, rather than the due-south street which was actually labeled Crosby. I kept looking for numbers on houses, but all the numbers were for the cross streets, and there were many vacant lots, but I remember walking this same way a few weeks ago with Suzie, and remember being surprised that I saw the familiar house HERE, amid former-tenement vacant lots and other miscellaneous private houses in this now-rundown neighborhood. I remember being relieved crossing 14th Street, because now I'm really getting close, but it's getting close to 2PM, and I still have to stop into the house to pee (and I remember being surprised, as I was leaving, that people from the school downstairs were using the front door as a main entrance, and being told to leave it open because students used it all the time---this certainly wasn't the way I remember 167 Crosby as it USED to be), and wondered whether I had the right keys for the right rooms to even pee, though maybe I could hold it until we got to our destination---still, paradoxically, Grandma's house. I figured the three siblings now had the time to talk about family business, though I rather wished I could be there to hear them, too. Didn't feel fatigue through my walk, but somehow, despite that, I knew it was there at some level to make the dream even more frustrating and uncomfortable and unending. 2) 9:35AM: I'm working at IBM and a former customer (who I don't remember) comes in to say that there's something wrong with my job for them, and I remark that it has to be determined whether it's a MISTAKE on my part, or an addition to the specifications. The client presents a small folder with a magazine article that he opens to a list of summary points at the end of the first section that mentions "the Desorb process" as being important, and I think to circle the sentence NOW with my dated comment that this is mentioned as being important, with the self-evident fact that, had it been mentioned BEFORE, I would have circled it and asked what it was and asked for a source for information about it.
WEDNESDAY, 8/31/11: 6:43AM: In a vacation place that seems to be a combination of Paris and Turkey, I'm looking at a map or photograph of a central square, and study a fountain in one place and a plaza in another place with a name like Lallement Square; it's not clear whether I'm looking at a TV documentary or actually present.
TUESDAY, 9/6/11: 2:10AM: 1) I've just taken off my pants, but I've got to pee, so I walk in my shorts across a very large uncarpeted floor, knowing that Carolyn can see me from her bedroom off this room, and I just don't care, thinking she's seen me in a bathing suit before, anyway. 2) She gave me a tiny appliqué to put on a lampshade, apologizing that it'll be finicky work to do, with two layers of paper, but I manage to peel off one backing and apply the thorn-like figure to the lampshade, too close to the picture for my taste, and it breaks in the center but I can still stick it to the lampshade, thinking it looks uncomfortably like a tiny figure of Christ on the cross.
THURSDAY, 9/8/11: 6:40AM: I'm using fingers, knife points, and pencil tips to meticulously remove tiny seeds, feathers, hulls, and pill fragments from two clear-glass pill containers, readying them for clean future use.
SUNDAY, 9/11/11: 6:26AM: 1) Watching a television program showing a family drama in which I seem to be a character: the mother is a terrible vindictive woman, and there's a legend that if the daughter drinks poison, the mother will die of the poisoning, and after many melodramatic sequences, the daughter tips a gold-rimmed glass of red liquid into her mouth, and too late the mother realizes it's poison, and she dies a hero to her family, primarily me. 2) I'm looking at what seems to be a National Geographic map, with incredible detail, printed on a fabric that I've used to cover my sofa, and look at one part and see beautifully colored temples in Burma and Malaysia, and I think I can use this as a guide to future trips, because the most beautiful sites are marked, as in a Baedeker, with numbered guides and stars according to merit. I look at another section where the Mayan temples at Copan and Chichen are marked so that I recognize which I've seen, and I think to get out my collection of National Geographic maps, spread them over the floor, and see which sites I've gone to and which I still want to go to. Then my mind progresses to Google Map, with which I can look at actual photographs of sites in all parts of the world, and my mind progresses to MTP, where I can put in the name of a country and it'll show sections with city names so that I can note sub-sections of countries that I can add to my country-count and update my been-to lists.
MONDAY, 9/12/11: 7:44AM: [In misery, just to capture dream.] The only specific DREAM image is sitting in the front of a car sitting at the very northern tip of a grassy island, wondering if this is the tip of Manhattan, but clearly it isn't, because I have an image of crossing a bridge FROM Manhattan to get to an island somewhere NEAR this. The half-waking dream concerns a multi-opera successor to The Ring: somehow the first opera has been finished, and I'm concerned about an "entr'opera" note that establishes the connection between the end of the first opera and the start of the next, which will be published in the program that will have to be read and understood before the second opera starts, but somehow that's scheduled for today or tomorrow, and it MUST take place because the tickets have already been dated and sold (maybe this is based on the opera tickets I actually got in the mail on Saturday), but it seems absolutely impossible that this happen. The events to be narrated are unclear: how was this written, what story does it tell, and how will the second opera actually BEGIN---none of this is clear, and I have to find out or the "entr'opera" can never be written. [Now my nose is dripping, I'm terribly uncomfortable, almost sick-feeling, at 7:52AM and I guess I've captured enough of the "dream" to finish and take care of ME.]
TUESDAY, 9/13/11: 3:50AM: My "wife" and I (sort of an Ozzie and Harriet) are rehearsing a dance number in which we form a box outside the pattern of the others' boxes, while singing "Praising, a sunshine kind of love" on an ascending series of notes. Also, when I was showering, I got to the wrinkled area around my ankles where my socks have corrugated the skin, and shout out with delight "BUBBLES," and we both laugh, and I say, "It's remarkable what we can remember after 50 years, shouting 'Bubbles' as we wash the wrinkled skin just above our ankles!" and laugh together, loving the picture we're producing for some audience somewhere.
WEDNESDAY, 9/14/11: 6:27AM: I'm in the country at a kind of summer camp, waiting for Delores to arrive with a car. I'd gotten very good scores in school to merit a place in the most exclusive camps, though I can't remember what my grade-point average was, whether it was 2.8 of 3, or 3.8 of 4, but when I report to someone that it was 2.8, that seems to be right choice. I look to one side and find there's a waterfall that sometimes sends spurts of water squirting over the side almost to the other side of the canyon into which the waters fall. Then Delores arrives, but she seems to have transformed into Michael, saying that the car has to be given to someone else, with the four wheels converted to two wheels (I assume to a motorcycle) for the next renter, which should cause us no problem, he insists. I'm not sure what the schedule for the day is to be, but my average has been set, so I won't have to take any more tests. Other components of the fairly elaborate dream are now forgotten.
FRIDAY, 9/16/11: 8:35AM: Many fragments: John waving a ticket, saying, "I'll probably end up paying $450 for this $100 flight." Looking at a list of seats on two flights and see that a pair that should be together are ON two different flights, and wonder how I could change the flight-numbers on one by bringing the seat number into the chart for the other flight. Telling someone, "They'll probably tell you that you shouldn't be trying to go by sea between these two points, you should have just flown." Wake with slight feeling of dread---as a result of the dreams? Anticipating something from the future? Memories of HAVING WAKEN in the past with a feeling of dread?
SATURDAY, 9/17/11: 5:53AM: I'm sitting for hours in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, first with someone like Ken, who introduces me to an older, elegantly dressed lady who happens to live in a basement apartment---she says it's so convenient for shopping and walking in Central Park. I'm being vaguely seductive, thinking to ask to see her apartment later in the afternoon, so much so that at one point I'm actually lying on my stomach, stretched out on a kind of sofa, like a male odalisque, dressed nicely myself in basic black and white, thinking I might be taken as a male version of a loose woman looking for someone to "take care of her." She leaves for a bit, then returns, remarking that I've been here quite a long time, and I make some remark about liking to look at the people who pass through. Ken, who's turned into someone rather like a younger Jean-Jacques, expresses amazement at his perceived custom to bring a tiny bouquet of flowers to someone one is seeing, or courting, in this particular venue, and I make some excuse as to why I'm not fitting into this pattern---mainly, being cheap.
MONDAY, 9/19/11: 7:28AM: I'm living in a two-level apartment that's nothing like any place in which I've lived in the past. Two or three friends, or maybe even roommates, chat with me before going downstairs to eat, or watch television, or otherwise occupy themselves and get out of my way. I decide to clear some things out, and take old boxes out of old shelving and empty them onto the floor to decide what to keep and what to throw out. One large box contains wall hangings, posters, even cloth scrolls that'd once hung on my college-room walls. I throw some out and prepare to store others, wondering how this wide box had once fit into that narrow shelf. Then I think to get old shopping bags and put things to be thrown out into them, thinking to take the shopping bags down two or three flights of stairs to the street, remembering that this is a Monday holiday, so trash pickup from the stoop should be tomorrow morning and I won't be blocking the sidewalk with my junk-filled bags for too long. But the shopping bags, some plastic and some paper, are already half-filled with, say, old shampoo bottles that I'd kept from the time I had to take to the gym my own tiny shampoos from hotels I'd visited; old pens and pencils from other hotels; miscellaneous souvenirs of a type I've long since decided not to keep (I can't remember what these were). I notice a heavy metal cross in a crumbling hole in the floor to some unused vent to the room below, and put it against a brick chimney, where it further destroys old grouting and falls with a thud onto the carpet on the floor below. I leave it for now. I open an old door and find old school books which I thought I'd thrown away ages ago. Jars of dried flowers mystify me: why did I keep THOSE? Lots of this stuff can be carted downstairs; or maybe I can load up a shopping cart and take them down the elevator? Which in my thoughts before this apartment hadn't had? And whole rooms filled with miscellany open before me to sort through, and I wake and pee and type only SOME of the details from this never-before dream.
WEDNESDAY, 9/21/11: 9:11AM: "New material" dream for an operation on my skin.
THURSDAY, 9/22/11: 7:09AM: Ken and Charles and I are dining at a very expensive restaurant that's darker than Corton, and I've not only ordered a dessert that neither of the others has ordered, but I've written the number of a SECOND dessert into a particular place on the bill which is seldom used for that purpose, but I'm sure I'll be served that second dessert. Then we're gathered around a small desk at the entrance where we're presented with our bill by an officious waiter who looks just like Marty, the Brooklyn Heights Video guy. I try to turn on an ornamental lamp to see the check in the dark lobby, but it doesn't work. None of us can read the total in the dimness, but we take out our credit cards and try to divide the bill according to what we had despite the inconvenience of the location.
FRIDAY, 9/23/11: 1) 4:10AM: I'm watching a BBC interview so closely I'm almost a part of it. A middle-aged woman, sort of a combination of my New Yorker readings on Daphne Guinness and Jean-Paul Gualtier, is rather composing her own biography during the interview, making herself more colorful with every word. She wants to delay certain facts with a comedian's vivacity, talking about husbands and children which came and went as characters in a play in her mind. I'm thinking, as are many viewers, that this could as well be a play as a biography or interview, and I wish I remembered more of the details! 2) 9:05AM: I'm being served a special "log-end stew," but Ken is very disappointed because the stew isn't made from log ends, so it doesn't have the special quality that he wanted me to taste. We talk about young/old worker jobs.
SATURDAY, 9/24/11: 8:42AM: A production team in NYC wants to do my plays (not YET on ZOLNERZONE).
SUNDAY, 9/25/11: 6:41AM: Spartacus gives me a ballet-program insert with sketches of a new ballet I didn't get in my program, but the guy behind me on the BAM bus got it and left it on his seat.
MONDAY, 9/26/11: 1) 6:54AM: I'm walking a long way through the Amazon jungle to get a language into which to translate my plays. At the end, I hear someone saying "Leave now, you're already ten minutes into the NEXT person's time. 2) 10:51AM: I'm leaving class on a university campus in England, and see that the snow covering the ice on the river has partly melted, and courageous students are making a risky crossing but getting their feet wet, so I choose to go to a bridge and walk down to a road that is now cleared of snow, intending to go up a path, that should now be clear, guarded by a stone gate. But when I look up the path from the gate, I see avalanches of mud intermittently coursing down the roadway, so it's dangerous to go that way, too. Flag a passing limousine with a number of businessmen, and then fear I won't have any money to pay for my part of the fare, but think I can slip away amid their numbers and not have to pay anything at all.
TUESDAY, 9/27/11: 8:57AM: Elaborate plans are made to get supplies aboard a ship using luggage from two passengers who will ride on different vehicles so that vehicle capacities won't be exceeded. Then it turns out that one of the passengers is a spy and has weapons, or contraband, in his suitcase, which has to be thrown overboard, losing some of the passengers' provisions. Very complicated plans are made to get everything right the second time.
WEDNESDAY, 9/28/11: 1) 4:12AM: I'm confronting a very sexy guy with a broad back, and I turn him around and press myself into his chest, looking closely into his eyes, and say, "I'd really like to see that body," and he smiles and asks me to come back to his apartment. 2) 8:31AM: I'm in a contest with a number of other people filling out a form listing people, jobs, places, and other categories---rather like Scattergories---all of which have to be filled in with a word starting with DRA, like drawing, or drain, or drawing room, or drama, or dramatic reading, etc., and I rather cheat by filling in many with variations of the same word, like drama.
FRIDAY, 9/30/11: 1) 6AM: My supervisor repeats FIVE times that I should check NEW answer entries where math problem factors have been CHANGED. 2) 9AM: I'm "taking a short cut" through my mini-van to sit outside my motel, but the car parked next to me is spewing exhaust fumes for some reason, and I just can't stand it, so I pop open my little door and scoot through the luggage room to exit from the back hatchback door, rather questioning why I just don't go AROUND my car to get back to the motel, rather than going THROUGH it. A little postscript has me observing passing kids who have been paid to wear branded shoes, which they plug to their neighbors as they pass: "Look how neat my new pink Keds slippers are," showing off their small feet below slim, tanned calves.
SUNDAY, 10/2/11: 8:22AM: The dream seemed to be all about aspects of control. At first, donuts of smoke or cloud were "directed" into shape by mental images and thought. Later, events on a trip were controlled by colors---bright red for male, matte blue for female---and directions---right-tending for male, left-tending for female. Plans and actions seemed self-fulfilling in that "progress" was noted even when the principles were applied without the observation of any obvious advantage resulting from the efforts. All very mystical and "spooky."
TUESDAY, 10/4/11: 4:30AM: I'm doing "my piles" in earnest before "The final lights go out in New York."
FRIDAY, 10/7/11: 8:26AM: Note dreams: 1) Town photographer takes picture of me. 2) Scrub dirty floors after rooms "fixed."
SATURDAY, 10/8/11: 8:28AM: 1) I'm in the back seat of a car driven by Aunt Helen, and, as preparation for my riding a pig in a race, she's testing a slope that could be used for the race, backing the car so that the rear wheels actually roll off the edge, panicking me, and she pooh-poohs my fear, saying the ropes would stop the car from going over the edge, and she just had to test how strong the edge was. 2) A group of us are in a chintz-decorated living room for a new kind of psychological treatment involving an odd bed which is being demonstrated to us: two women lie on the bed, which then rises about five inches off the floor, raised to a mechanism against the far wall, and then dropped to the floor and raised again, when one rolls off the bed onto a narrow, hard-looking set of wire springs, and then rolls UNDER the bed to be in a kind of aquarium which permits them to swim out from under the head of the bed onto a kind of porch outside, where they (now both of them) get up, laughing, and proceed to the next section of the oddball therapy. Onlookers are not impressed, but manage not to laugh.
MONDAY, 10/10/11: 1) 7:20AM: I'm constructing a Styrofoam model of a section of a country, with different colors on the pieces of foam indicating ethnicity of that section, and I lastly come up with shades of blue to denote a small group of Italians of which I just have become aware, at the edge of a predominantly yellow section which represents French-speaking people. I'm happy that this nit-picking project is nearing completion, reflecting my real-life happiness with reducing the number of piles on my coffee table yesterday by one, and the prospect of getting rid of another pile today. Feel virtuous on recording the details of the dream right after I had it. 2) 8:43AM: I'm adding cornstarch to a pot of mashed potatoes, which then GROWS to an ENORMOUS overflowing size!
WEDNESDAY, 10/12/11: 8:34AM: Elements of modern-paranoid, science-apocalypse, junk-TV fare pervaded the dream that seemed profound during its unfolding, yet will undoubtedly lack power and detail in the retelling. I and an unknown colleague are possibly working for a super-secret government agency in an impossibly complex plot whose basic details are mostly unknown, yet assumed to be earth-shaking. If I'm present in a certain Manhattan office building at 8:30AM, I'll probably die in a 9/11-type disaster, though it might be averted if I say the secret word, or if the fuse doesn't detonate, or if the plot doesn't quite include this final step as most of our upper echelon are sure it will. Or maybe my mere presence will provide the crucial detail that PREVENTS the apocalypse from apocalypting. Or my THINKING about being there will send thought-waves to mess up the intentions of the darkest enemy so that he (or she) will err in an almost humorous way. I can avoid it by simply not going: I'd have to sacrifice sleep and travel to Manhattan on a train that only leaves at 6:30AM; yet an "oh-what-the-hell" sangfroid lingers in the back of my mind in a kind of both-and philosophical trope: If I CAN do it, maybe I SHOULD do it, and whatever MIGHT happen WON'T happen, and I'll have some days at leisure to make up the missing hours of sleep. The "telephone-squeak-as-the-indicator-of-total-annihilation" feature is dramatically present, yet the "my-power-is-unlimited-and-thus-I-can't-die" Messianism is lingering brightly before the blackness of destruction. The audience holds its breath while I meditate on my course of action. I type a dream which has become mostly Monday-morning-quarterbackingly detailed with words that had no existence in the dream itself.
THURSDAY, 10/13/11: 8:10AM: I'm looking at the construction of a floating wooden dance floor, noting that the bottom layer is 6x4 feet, the next is 4x6, and the top is 5x5, so that one "square" is only one layer thick in one corner, and though the areas work out OK (24, 24, and 25), the configuration is geometrically impossible, and changing the measurements to 5x4 and 4x5 doesn't help. The name Alnera is associated with it, and I think of its similarity to Zolnerzak. Somehow the whole thing is South American. Silly details.
SUNDAY, 10/16/11: 5:22AM: I'd worked on a book written by a boatman---not exactly a fisherman, but he made his living from his work on his boat as well as from his writing---and I'd moved in with him as an ignorant helper somehow fearing to get involved emotionally with this solitary fellow with some of the characteristics---bodily and emotionally---of Bill Hyde. Then I read another book, written by someone else, that includes a married couple that I'd read about in his first book, and I take that opportunity to ask about how many books that couple might be included in, and he uses that to explain some more personal things about himself while we're lying face to face in the same bed, with his arms extended toward me---not sexually, but in close companionship. I felt nervous at the start of the physical contact, but as it didn't increase in intimacy, I gradually accepted it as part of the relationship. I seemed almost a child, either chronologically or developmentally, contrasted with his rough adulthood, though I at some level thought that if we lived closer to other people---perhaps we lived in a Canadian Atlantic-seacoast wilderness---they might regard our closeness with some suspicion of sexual subjugation on my part. Maybe I was more a mentally deficient adult than an ignorant pre-adult. I was oddly non-judgmental, suspicious yet basically trusting of my ability to "leave if it went where I didn't care for it to go." Somehow, now, I think of the rough ignorance of "The Bicycle Thief" and "Bitter Rice," which I haven't seen yet, that I'd recorded last night from TCM.
MONDAY, 10/17/11: 8:58AM: I'm arranging two sticks of dynamite with long white fuses on the hood of an automobile in which two of us are sitting, and thinking how best to arrange the fuses so that one burning will not prematurely set off the second stick.
TUESDAY, 10/18/11: 8:04AM: I'm in a summer camp, in a central area where a play is about to be read, the parts passed out on a cardboard folder with lots of cast members, but I forget who I was supposed to read. At first there's a crowd in chairs around the stage area, but then the reading is postponed and most people leave, and I'm nonplussed to find I'd sorted stamps ON the stage, and now have to gather them up again, without a supply of glassine envelopes to put them into to keep them separated, and I just have to pile them atop each other and hope it won't take so long to sort them out again. Then I have to find my large travel bag to put the stamps into, and spot it behind a huge rock outcropping beside a road below, but find I can't get to the bag without going down to the road, which seems too far down to jump to, but by holding onto tree trunks and lowering myself gradually, I can step down onto the road with an increasing sense of frustration that I won't be able to locate my bag from the road, and this is all a NIGHTMARE, from which I wake.
WEDNESDAY, 10/26/11: 8AM: I'm going for lunch at the IBM cafeteria, alone because my co-workers in my department are all on vacation, and I don't want to sit with acquaintances from the commercial group. So I sit at a table for two (this seems to be based on my trouble finding a seat at Shake Shack last night) and when someone sits across from me, I pick up my tray, so heavy that it bends slightly in the middle, threatening to send the laden plates sliding off the tray, and move toward another table. Other moves follow, and the next episode has me trying to leave a crowded aisle, still having trouble with a weak tray that threatens to leak fluids from dishes onto people below, and two women look back at me with astonishment as I drip onto their trays, and I actually SHOVE them to get them MOVING so that I can get OUT of the aisle and dispose of my tray of empty dishes. Prior to that, I'd debated getting a Germanic kind of loaf clearly based on the ad for an Italian timpano I saw in New York Magazine before bed last night, but I already have some kind of bulky quiche on my platter, and I can't possibly eat BOTH dishes, amazed that the cooking in the IBM cafeteria seems to be better, recently, than in most neighboring restaurants. First food-based dream in a long time (well, there was log-end stew on 9/23, and one line on mashed potatoes on 10/10).
THURSDAY, 10/27/11: 8:43AM: I'm shopping in a strange upper-west-side shop, whose second floor is reached by a rickety wooden scaffolding served by ladders on two sides, one for up and one for down. I ask for a four-pack of large rolls of toilet paper, and by mistake self-charge them to the wrong slot: on the left side rather than the right side, and the receipt paper is almost lost in a mass of papers on the other side of the terminal. Buy two other things and check them out on the correct machine, but lose THAT receipt, which the owner---no, only a substitute for the owner, the old fellow makes clear---retrieves for me. I say that the silk-texture plaid shorts aren't mine, however. I throw old shoes, which are still mine, however, out a window into a back alley to "save" them for possible future use. Then a hyperactive salesman tries to sell a rotating device that can be used to scratch backs, apply paint, and brush teeth, and he tries it, too forcefully, on me, and I say it would be better if it could be adjusted for individuals' teeth, since I feel it presses too hard against the sides and rather misses the front and center teeth. Very strange place, all in all, and at the end I'm walking around barefoot, wondering where I left my shoes, but feel they're easy to describe: Velcro straps with black socks in them. Typical "where are they" semi-nightmare dream-climax. Type to 8:49AM, almost hallucinating with lack of sleep since 2AM and awake since 5:15AM.
FRIDAY, 10/28/11: 7:10AM: I'm in the same bedroom with some rich woman in an elegant Fifth Avenue-type mansion, knowing that we're both annoyed at the throwing-together, and though I don't know the reason, we're both resigned to the awkwardness and trying to be as considerate of the other as possible. She wordlessly hands me my deodorant, and I nod and leave our bedroom to go across to another suite of rooms to spray myself. When I take too much time, she calls across, "What's taking so long?" "I'm trying to find the light switch to turn off all the lights," I tell her. She suddenly jolts into action, saying something about the security system, and runs off to check something. A previous fragment gave me to understand that though she was rich and important, she was actually only something like a high-ranking chauffeur in this political household. My presence is totally unexplained, but I'm actually THERE, rather than just looking at a movie or TV show.
THURSDAY, 11/3/11: 5:45AM: I seem to be an older teenager in an aristocratic British family, maybe in Africa, preparing for an elaborate set of hunts in different terrains. My mother, appearing cold and methodic, suggests I follow my father's pattern in packing for one particular scenario; "Isn't that after two other events, toward the end of the trip?" I ask, thinking that instructions for those other events would take precedence, but she imperiously demands that I go to my father now, for this. I go, and he shows me a pattern of full-dress suit, then something casual for the evening, and then there's a strange tableau, shown as if on a TV screen from above, with my mother, naked, posing profile immediately below, so I just see bumps of tits and ass from above, then my father, seemingly clothed, then my sister, attire indeterminate, then myself, from a distance, embarrassed, for some reason, because my sister can look at my mother naked, and I wake thinking the whole scenario strange.
THURSDAY, 11/17/11: 9:59AM: I'm visiting a storage facility with a small team from the computer company for which I'm returning to work after a long vacation. The room is small, but all the walls are lined with cabinets with different forms of archives: books, filing cabinets, large containers designed to hold objects of specific dimensions, some of which I'm even tempted to open to see what they contain. A co-worker mentions a project that I might be taking over, but I protest that I know nothing about it---I really have to get back to the two projects I haven't finished yet---and I stop with amazement that I STILL haven't finished the billing program and the routing-schedule routines. Then we're outside, walking through a park, and we're following a troupe of African performers with truly amazing headdresses of intricate design and startling height. They stop in a central plaza to set up their high-wire apparatus, while a team next to them gets applause when five women are held aloft by three women below them on the ground with triumphant music that takes all the attention away from the African aerialists. I think how astounding all this is when as I wake.
THURSDAY, 11/24/11: 8:58AM: I push the wrong button and my suitcase, which should have gone to a departure lounge, is directed to go to the "Mexican Spa." I follow it through an elaborate forest set up to shield tourists from anything smacking of the country itself, wishing I had my camera to take pictures of what looks like the deck of an enormous cruise ship filled with people in various shops, villages, hideaways, drinking establishments, and pleasure palaces, and hope I may be getting closer to my bag to return it to "Africa," which is the closest place I can find to the airport from which I hope to depart with my bag, just now thinking of the sequence from "Mad Men" when Jon Hamm's bag is returned from Mexico to the front door of his home when he's been forbidden to stay there. [Note that this is the first dream typed DIRECT to computer in TWO WEEKS!]
FRIDAY, 11/25/11: 8:55AM: I'm on a trip in what may be Rome, having come far from my hotel on the outskirts of town, and I have to shit, and go into a strange public area in what may be a central hotel, where there are two johns available, but both were being maintained when I entered, so I was prepared to wait, and suddenly there were lines before what seemed to be a men's room and a woman's room, and people who weren't there when I arrived seemed to be ahead of me, and I wonder if there wasn't some kind of tipping required, where I had no Italian money on me. Debated briefly about returning to my own hotel, but it was too far away. English-speaking women on a tour debated about "going the wrong way" in some kind of religious explanation of what they were seeing, as if the location had suddenly changed to Israel and these women were worried about seeing sites from a non-Christian tradition. I sat patiently waiting what I hoped was my turn, and woke with a small need to shit, but not before I transcribed this to 8:59AM.
SATURDAY, 11/26/11: 5:35AM: I'm directing some play I was in that I had trouble memorizing my nothing part in three tiny scenes, and the night of MY direction I just ANNOUNCE: "Oh, just cut my part," and then I READ my lines when needed, cast astonishment be damned. What happens when it gets DARK and no one can SEE isn't answered yet. ANOTHER "two-pronged" nightmare.
SATURDAY, 12/3/11: 6:52AM: I'm at a Bayreuth-type exclusive resort, and a campy leader, like Marlene Dietrich imitating Noel Coward, marks Susan Boyle as "a loser's date." She's "protecting me from fire as we move from corner to corner in an evening's soiree.
SUNDAY, 12/4/11: 1) 7:39AM: I'm in a class in a school, using my book, and the teacher directs that we start writing in our workbook, which I haven't brought to class with me. I know I'll get demerits for not bringing it, but he could have TOLD us we'd be using it! I leave and go to another building, where I easily find my old desk and ask the grade-school student sitting there to move so I can get my book bag out of the desk. It's there, under other material, and I just take the whole bag, seeing that the green workbook is there, along with a number of other notebooks. Then outside and realize I don't know how to get back to my classroom. Think to get a taxi, but somehow I'm now rather in the countryside, away from the center of town, and they're not common out here. Finally a bright-eyed fellow in a taxi stops to let me share his cab, and I'm very grateful to him. Turns out there are 4-5 other passengers, and two are let out at a shop where everyone goes in for a snack, and I'm grateful for this opportunity to see how these Brits live, but I look at my watch and it's 2:45PM already and class will be over at 3PM and I'm not even sure where the next class is being held. People are eating snacks, offering me a chocolate-covered nut from one jar, and then a fluffy object that they call a waffle is tasty from another jar. I say I really have to get going, and realize that the people I'm talking to are NOT the people from the taxi! Out to the street that's suddenly dark, and, where a small group of people had been outside the shop when I went in, now all the streets are jammed with crowds, now in a light rain, obscuring where the taxi might have been, and I'm aware that I'm now in a nightmare and wake to pee and record dream to 7:48AM. 2) 9:43AM: I'm handling a giant garden tomato, dirt caked on skin, and it turns to mush inside as I try to wash it clean.
MONDAY, 12/5/11: 8:28AM: An obsessive-compulsive, nit-picker's dream: I'm either a lawyer or an accountant, preparing either a case or an expense account. I'd been given a large number of papers that could be categorized: 1) statements, 2) bills, 3) other types of documents. I'd sorted all the papers into their categories, invented descriptive names for the categories, and listed what could be transactions, receipts, or other records. I bundled each type of paper together and had written or typed papers which acted like index-card alphabetizers, and now, in a room which may have been an annex to a courtroom, or an evidence chamber, or simply a workroom, I began correlating the bundled papers with my descriptive notes. Other workers nearby forced me to condense my workspace into a small area, and I had no idea about whether what I was doing was right or wrong, helpful or useless, germane or irrelevant; I only knew that I was charged by some unknown agency to organize all these papers, whether for a court case, or an expense audit, or simply an organized description of the material I'd been given. Obviously "the material" could be taken as an analogy of my website, or my life, or my writings, or my souvenirs, or my wishes, or my accomplishments, or my failings. What it "actually" was, the dream gave me no clue. It seemed to be one of a SERIES of dreams: previously, I'd been given the material and MAYBE given some instructions of how to handle it, but, if so, I'd forgotten exactly what the previous dreams were, except that the material seemed familiar, as if I'd handled it before. I may have dreams in the FUTURE that take the material, the nit-picking, the obsessiveness with detail, ever further. This description is the best I can come up with now. Oh, and it seemed to go on FOREVER, in something like real time. And, when I play Spider after typing this, it's ALSO an analogy of the techniques and manipulations I use when playing SPIDER!
TUESDAY, 12/6/11: 1) 4:35AM: Dream of guy who EVERYONE loves, EVEN when he's GONE, "absence makes the heart grow fonder," and MORE when he returns. 2) 8:05AM: Dream of "Perfect Italian Bill," somehow related to previous dream.
WEDNESDAY, 12/7/11: Hospital teams comparing jobs: dying man put HIS doctor's charges on his NURSE'S credit card bill, thousands of dollars per day.
THURSDAY, 12/8/11: 6:08AM: I'm in a kind of graduate school that might be Columbia, and I don't have room enough in my dormitory to store sets of new clothes (corduroy trousers and suit jackets), and the rules prevent me from setting up an open-end closet. Then I remember the clothing bags and think I can send them into some kind of seasonal storage for winter clothes, and exchange them for summer clothes. A related episode has me squeezing a kind of can with a paper label into a tiny safe, but I realize that the torn label might jam up the door and make the safe impossible to open, so I remove the label completely. Joe Safko says he'll meet me for coffee in the lounge, but it starts to fill and soon all the chairs are occupied, but then half the room is cleared to form a kind of stage; I think to sit next to a woman I knew from high school and chat with her, but I'm not really sure it's her, and don't remember her name, so I realize I can't really do that. I'm quite young and feeling as if this new environment makes any kind of behavior possible.
SUNDAY, 12/11/11: 8:30AM: Very complicated dream resolves to a memory of my sitting in a car, trying to get to a place where I can get an updated version of a program that I have to use, saying "It would be nice to have a cell phone now."
TUESDAY, 12/13/11: 6:04AM: Sexy guy in white pants, with hard-on, saying he gives his favorite cat first, best, lick at his self-produced seed. He turns into a hard-nippled young guy, laying across my chest, who reminds me of a much younger Peter R.
THURSDAY, 12/15/11: 7:17AM: Maybe I'm a character in an elaborately plotted TV series, or just watching one, but threads of the plot seem to be unraveling to explain how complications introduced in the past, that made plot-lines tragic or ominous, are being resolved. Characters are given a final chance to perform properly in jobs that had been subject to criminal impulses to wrong-doing, and now these characters are "awakened" to their past errors and have an opportunity to act in honorable ways that will make everyone happy. Summaries, maybe voice-overs as in "Reise," are provided to show viewers how correct actions now will remedy past deviations. Everyone hopes for satisfactory resolutions to all situations. It's as if this dream is a template for the resolution of many PAST dreams with similar complicated situations breathlessly awaiting UNentanglement.
FRIDAY, 12/16/11: 3:23AM: Dream of an alien who won't return an "eyehole key," but who BUT an alien could ENTER through an eyehole (at the top of a door)?
MONDAY, 12/19/11: 6:10AM: Business guy invades self-help group and talks of getting better service at post offices for private users as opposed to commercial users. His HAT falls forward over his face and stays for a bit, and Dorothy Hunter rolls her eyes at me and I can't stop laughing.
TUESDAY, 12/20/11: 6:02AM: Sweet silent vignette of putting my arm across two young men's legs as we rest in what could be a church pew. My leg is also across their bodies. One, sensing the cold flesh of my leg, considerately pulls a consoling blanket across it. Nice.
THURSDAY, 12/22/11: 5:05AM: I'm part of a very important tour to China, and our group is privileged to meet some high-ranking Chinese military officials who will be touring a particularly sensitive spot: maybe the site of a catastrophe the previous year. I'd been getting closer and closer to the leader of the Chinese contingent, priding myself on the clarity of my English which the head general can understand and even reply to with his tentative English. Then I happen to overhear some of the lesser members of our group murmur that they didn't understand why this spot was considered such a delicate place to be in---that they were even in danger with their mere presence here---and their remarks so stung me with their insensitivity that I invented a story to impress them: how in the past a small group had made a similar statement of their obliviousness to their danger and, when I paused dramatically, one of the stupid younger cadre made an ugly strangled face and chopped his hand at the back of his neck repeatedly, whereupon I assumed my most somber tone and said, "That's exactly what happened: they were killed!" My statement so affects one of the women in our group that she starts talking to me and the group with tears standing in her eyes, saying things that are totally out of line due to my mendacity in trying to appear important, that I stare at her in utter dismay, not knowing what to say to rescue this terrible situation. Wake with a feverish feeling of impending illness, even doom, and take three aspirin and type this to 5:19AM.
FRIDAY, 12/30/11: 6:53AM: I'm in a prison camp with many other Americans, and we're all being tortured in sadistic ways: 1) we're not supposed to talk to other prisoners, but when we don't answer questions we're punished; 2) we're not supposed to take the drink that our captors offer us, but it seems to turn out that it's anti-diarrhea medicine that helps us; 3) we're supposed to avoid being beaten, but we're rewarded when we perversely ask to be beaten; 4) at some point, the guards give us favors, and treats, and kindnesses, when all we're led to expect from them is torture. I seem to be the last to catch on to the trick of behaving "oppositely" in order to be rewarded. I try weeping to get sympathy, but, again, it seems the opposite of the thing to do. I'm in a state of constant bewilderment and utter despair. I shudder to think how this dream applies to my real life: am I imprisoning myself in ways of dealing with reality that are anti-productive? Am I torturing MYSELF as if I'm in a prison of my own creation? Are some of my actions, that I think are beneficial, actually harmful? Like keeping a NOTEBOOK, or transcribing DREAMS? Can my website be a kind of nemesis? Can Spider be damaging to my aging brain rather than benefiting it? Can my therapy be harming me? Are my current thoughts, through their "oppositeness," damaging? Which is the right direction? Which the beneficial behavior, the correct endeavor, the fruitful expenditure of energy? At base---horrible base---is a question that could be framed: What's going on here? Is---this---ALL---somehow---WRONG? Is EVERYTHING I do, or try to do, AGAINST what I should be doing for my own benefit? At a deeper base, WHY am I doing what I'm doing? How completely horrible a set of thoughts resulting from transcribing my dream. At 7:05AM I continue taking notes on the dream: Is Freilich telling me wrong? Is my "wound" KILLING me? Am I, somehow, doing what I'm doing, HARMING me? Then I think to do Actualism. Then I think: "Is ACTUALISM wrong?"---"even HARMFUL?" IS my fear of Freilich being wrong the CORE of the dream? Are THESE the sequence of thoughts---of events---that I'd thought of before: the EXACT thoughts that IMMEDIATELY PRECEDE MY DEATH?? Added later: and this all sounds TERRIBLY overwrought!