DREAMS of 2012 1 of 2
SUNDAY, 1/1/12: 7:37AM: I'm indexing a book on some Midwestern woman, and, in the MIDDLE of the dream, talk to Marj about her mother, who this woman either IS or RESEMBLES, and Marj dismisses the idea that she could have written a book about her mother, even though she was rich and influential. I note that I have to ask the production editor about style: I'm going to have a lot of entries like "Bucky, see Fuller, Buckminster" and "Pucelle, Le, see Joan of Arc," and want to know if I have to take time to transfer one-page references or not. Also look at the solitary word "merican" and the bottom of a page, and realize it's a turn from "A-" above, for "American," but then see that it's really "meHican," a typo. In turning back pages, see that I've missed a number of "mentions" of names that I should include, or the index will be VERY small. Also wonder what to do with "case studies" that are introduced by phony names. Dream book merges into real life when I'm on a sunny front porch in a rich suburb preparing to have an elaborate lunch at what might be a society wedding, which may be a reflection of my thoughts about lunch at Park Plaza this afternoon with the Games Group people.
WEDNESDAY, 1/4/12: 8:39AM: Dream of me jerking off guy with a VERY thick cock, and it feels VERY good on both ends. A young kid with his shirt open to a nice thin chest says, "Don't touch me," and when I try to touch his nipples, he withdraws with an angry, "I SAID don't touch me." Sad.
THURSDAY, 1/5/12: 6:45AM: Audition: 1) A cute young guy and I are on the first few days of a long-term date, in which we're evaluating each other. We seem to impress each other favorably until the morning of the fourth day, when the final physical inspection is due. By a sequence of mischances, what was to have been a naked showdown in a private room now takes place in a CROWDED public area, and I contrive to take my clothes off behind protective screens, or scrims of people, or hiding bits of overclothes, but the crux comes when he lowers my shorts to investigate my privates, and he draws back in shock at the odor of three full unwashed days---yet he manages an understanding, tolerant, smile, and I say, "If we can survive THIS, we can survive ANYTHING," and the implication is that the relationship will succeed. 2) A large cast is going through a STAGE audition, something like "A Chorus Line," and the numbers are indicated by Roman numerals from 1 to 32 on a call-sheet. As each number is performed, the next number lights up. Circumstances dictate a path that varies more and more widely from numerical order, and everything builds (rather like "Tree of Life" that I watched last night) to a question ("Was it all a dream," as "Tree of Life" seemed to end) that hangs on the audience vote of confidence after the last number is radically changed by some event as important as 9/11.
FRIDAY, 1/6/12: 1) I'm directing people to lay rows of roses, cauliflowers, squash, and other items as if they were slides for display, hurrying before it rains, which starts while a servant from our hotel says we can start breakfast at 8AM, and maybe he'll get umbrellas to protect us from the rain, but we have to hold THEM rather than move produce around the display with two hands. 2) I'm walking with a female friend down very long streets in Moscow, knowing from having previously looked at maps that we're traversing division streets between very different neighborhoods over long distances.
MONDAY, 1/9/12: 1) I'm manipulating a large string of stamps which I've laboriously sorted in order of country and date, and I clumsily drop one stack, and then another stack, until the whole string is impossibly messy and I'll just have to sort them all over again. 2) Mom has me choose a gift from five choices, but only one is a small beaded shape that I recognize as having some special significance, so I pick that---and then she argues with me about why I picked THAT one and I retort that she KNEW that I would KNOW that that was a different one, and OF COURSE I would pick that one!
THURSDAY, 1/12/12: 7:04AM: I'm a knight, kneeling to make a prince marry me to fight his wars and make him king. As I'm leaving, after our marriage, I hint that I'm never coming back, and he almost cries before I protest that it was just a joke and of course I'm coming back.
SATURDAY, 1/14/12: 9:50AM: 1) 6:10AM note: Dream of thinking to smoke some of the grass in a jar on my toilet tank at 167 Hicks, but Mom's visiting and would smell the smoke, so I just drink the water that I poured into the bottom of the jar in hopes that it would absorb some of the hallucinogenic properties of the pot. 2) 9:37AM: HUGE dream: I started in a spare wooden bedroom of a kind of ashram, concerned about the rain coming in some of the windows and dripping through the ceiling from the floor above. Then I became aware I was part of a group, like an Actualism class, that had been volunteered as a kind of test group for a new kind of teaching which at first appeared to be a small extension of Actualism, but over the course of the ensuing night transformed into an enormous, almost militaristic, overarching philosophy-scheme that gained flavors of a North Korean religious oligarchy ruled by semi-human, semi-godlike avatars with impassive faces and Buddhistic robes and headdresses. The transformation came in the form of hour-long sessions, in which our group was led deeper, or higher, into realms of theory that were finally summarized by elaborate fold-out booklets, vividly colored, featuring calligraphic language that vacillated between English letters and Chinese-type characters, that culminated in a final efflorescence of a chart that opened both to the left and right, and then both from the top and bottom, into a gigantic, though fragile, colorful but not gaudy, almost understandable summation of the construct introduced by the teachings of the previous hour. Students dropped out as they became exhausted or overwhelmed, until only I and a few self-chosen ones were left to try to compare notes and verify our understanding of what THAT was all about. Our guides became increasingly other-worldly, part science fiction, part medieval mystery tale, and part "Journey-to-the-East fantastical." More and more oriental, impassive, poker-faced, superior, albeit less human. The name "Parana" seemed right, though I'd paused with the word "Purana," which I think means something in Hindi. But Parana contains Prana, breath, to symbolize the basic life-giving quality of the new teaching; and Parana is the name of a foreign, very powerful, river with a number of famous waterfalls from the past (Sete Quedas) and present (Iguassu); and Pana is like the word for bread in many countries. We few remaining students had stayed awake all night, and our tutors were aware of this as they prepared us for some final initiation from which they were prepared to excuse anyone who was too exhausted to continue, or thought they couldn't encompass the magnitude of the experience, but I looked forward to it in the spirit with which I took most of the Actualism courses: I'm curious where this is going: if it's true and verifiable, it would be wonderful; if it's only some kind of pipe dream, it's a marvelous story on many levels; if it turns out to be malevolent, I'll recognize it and turn away from disaster in time. Then I woke, feeling energized because I'd slept over ten hours! Shit, then typed the second dream, and then filled in the first until 10:15AM!
SUNDAY, 1/15/12: 6:22AM: I'm struggling to get into a yellow short-sleeved shirt that I'll wear with a suit to go to a doctor's appointment. Before that, Rolf cradled my neck gently, lovingly, for a long time, while I drifted off to sleep, and I later tried rubbing his leg to get some kind of sexual closeness.
MONDAY, 1/16/12: 9:36AM: I'm visiting an area I'd visited before, either on my "mystery coast" of northern Manhattan, or on another island like Martha's Vineyard, where the only road had been a dirt road along the coast because the inland terrain was too difficult with streams, marshes, and forests to build a paved road. Now they've constructed an aerial tramway that skims over the rugged terrain by means of only a few towers built far apart, and I comment to others riding with me that this is very much an improvement over the previous travel hazards. Then I'm at a shore where individuals board coffin-shaped boats to traverse a body of water, and I see Ken lying down in the boat that's taken off ahead of me, and figure I just have to follow his example, though the wales are so shallow that rocking the boat may cause it to fill with water, and that's followed by walking on a new surface built on an old path in town. This note starts with a cryptic phrase of my "filling in room sloppily."
TUESDAY, 1/17/12: 1) 5:38AM: I'm getting three 500-mg tabs of mescaline or acid from Vince in the New York Actualism Center for three of us "on vacation from San Francisco." Some teacher raves about my youthful appearance. 2) 8:30AM: a) Triple-page numbers in large typeface have to be manually inserted by me on a BIG index which is due TODAY, and there's just no possibility that I will be able to do it. b) I'm looking for a men's room, but am told that the only working one is on the fifth floor after I look at one on the ground floor which is a total mess with construction tools, bags, and wheelbarrows all over the place.
WEDNESDAY, 1/18/12: 1) 7:09AM: An earthquake in Paris leaves only duck and beans in an eatery; no potatoes, no dessert. 2) 9:27AM: I want to get out of my bed at 1221 Dietz without Rita, in Mom's bed, seeing me.
FRIDAY, 1/20/12: 6:05AM: Very elaborate dream of my apartment (more like 167 Hicks than 101 Clark) made into an artistic environment in which attendees could look at books, use my computer, read notebooks, look at art objects and travel souvenirs, and investigate my life. Clearly, this stems from my desire that more people read---and comment on---zolnerzone. It was also influenced by the Christmas apartment of Jack Smith (as Sharkbait---Whoever [Google the name and it turned out to be Sharkbait Starflesh, and then led me to the Doctor Who Wiki, which led me to Wikia, a possible base for an individual website, which took to 6:28AM) that John and I visited, stoned, many years ago whose contents impressed me so much. It started as an orgy, with fleeting moments of sexual encounters with large penises (maybe "30 Rock" was here too, with Tracy Jordan's comment that gay men should just look at their own penises), but eventually I put on my clothes and just moved from seat to seat to observe others looking at different parts of my installation. At one point someone remarked about my usage of Spider, and I was impressed, asking them how they found that out: did I happen to leave my computer with Spider on the screen? Did they read my notebooks? Did they look at the cards on my desk? At another point, a green envelope with a faint impression of the name Frances Beeson (or was it Frances Lennie, who I vaguely connect to ASI or EFA?) was shown, by me, to a mousy woman who just may have BEEN the woman whose name was imprinted on the envelope as if a wet-ink image (in reverse, since the impression was "true") of the name had been inserted into the envelope and "blotted off" on the inside of the envelope. She asked how I had gotten this, and I wasn't able to tell her since I just didn't know. I simply can't imagine how this agglomeration of images can be interpreted to be useful or revelatory or significant.
TUESDAY, 1/24/12: 6:20AM: The dream had many qualities of a fever dream: seeming to go on forever in real time, convincingly lifelike yet inherently impossible, and circumstantially ridiculous: I'm living in an apartment that abuts a performance space in which a kind of contest-play is being put on: the audience is seated at desks, as in a classroom, that have crossword puzzle forms on each of them which the audience is presumably supposed to fill out, given clues in the performance---in fact at one point it's implied that the bottom half of the puzzle is merely a transcription of the words of the play itself. At the beginning I think that the puzzle is "legitimate" in that it has a unique solution both horizontally and vertically, but at the end it's clear that there could be no vertical sense if the horizontal is ACTUALLY a transcription. The crux of the dream is that members of the audience begin to enter my apartment: innocently, at first, apologizing when I tell them that this is my private space and not part of the public theater; rather vindictively toward the end when they seem to think either that I'm lying and am part of the play, or that even if I'm NOT part of the play they have the RIGHT to do whatever they want in my space: take things, go to the toilet, break things, and ignore me. Toward the end I see that most of the desks are empty and only a dogged few are still seated, trying to complete the clearly impossible crossword. Others are helpfully constructing a fence that prevents anyone from entering my private space. Still others are maliciously invading my space. Toward the end I recognize the "impossibility" of the situation, not yet ascribing the actions of me or of audience members as taking place in a dream. My "first clue" comes with my trying to make sense out of the clearly nonsensical crossword puzzle, which I begin to think of as a metaphor for my life: obsessive-compulsive, irrational, and, somehow, dreamlike. I semi-wake and continue existing in the dream while realizing it IS a dream, then get up to pee and transcribe what I remember.
WEDNESDAY, 1/25/12: 8:15AM: I'm facing the challenge of getting into a building through a small opening in a concrete foundation that requires that I chin myself to get to the opening, then force a widening by pushing myself through the narrow slot. I manage to do this with an ease that surprises me. Later, I'm in the back yard of this building and am horrified to see squadrons of enormous tarantulas scurrying over bushes all around me, and looking down a cliff I see what I think to be a WHITE tarantula that turns into a fierce-eyed hawk that swoops directly upward toward me. Still later, without transition, I'm looking with admiration at a slender body of a man clothed only in a semi-transparent gown who seems to be in some kind of agony, and he's urinating, or simulating urination, in a nearly invisible stream that makes his gown cling more revealingly to his beautiful lower torso and legs, making me want to caress it. I wake, still tired, after a solid eight hours' sleep.
THURSDAY, 1/26/12: 7:37AM: I'm visiting a family in an old-style Victorian house in far-north Manhattan, and at 2PM the wife casually mentions that the whole family is driving upstate about 3:15 to stay overnight in a lodge, where I could room with Fred if I wanted. I think about the annoyance of having dinner in the lodge with the group, which includes two children of irritating youth, but the area is pleasant and I'd enjoy walking the main street early in the evening, as well as the countryside on the way up and back. Then the phone-answering service rings and someone else takes a message for me from "someone named Avis," who I take to be Avi, who in the dream lives upstate in the same area of the lodge, and I think I could visit him, too. While I'm reading in a kitchen, someone remarks that the light bulb, which "is corroded," should be changed, and I observe that without having any responsibility for changing it. Odd dream with intimations of myself "in another life," as yesterday felt for me.
TUESDAY, 1/31/12: 5:27AM: Another deeply treasured "I want to go to there" architectural fantasy-dream: a small group of friends and I have gone late to an area of what one small poster claims to be a tour of "narrow-margin New Jersey," which seems to include a trail through old coastal towns usually closed to outside tourists, but that now, quite late at night, has been lit with spotlights that make it appear almost as bright as sunlit day. Hordes of people make their way along crowded walkways between warehouses that are boarded or rarely used that lead to hundred-year-old residential areas where most of the mansions occupy their own blocks, towering five or six, or even a dozen floors into the indeterminate (not light, not dark, not clear, not foggy) sky. I wish I'd brought my camera to capture some of the Victorian piles that make Bannerman's Castle look like low-price rip-offs. One monstrous old-Italian Baroque-style edifice is fronted with panes of glass, dozens of which seem to outline floors about twenty feet high, but ascend to complex facades that imply four or five floors in a space that could possibly contain only two floors at the most, suggesting that the facade is a fantasy obscuring the actual construction inside. I peer into a black transparent square to see no hint of internal volume. Early in the dream I wandered through interiors with friends, but we gradually got separated and I lost all hope of rejoining them, yet this dream didn't have that quality of "lost and can't find my way back" that such architecturally rich dreams sometimes have. I was glad I was here, wanted to spend more time, and was sorry we had chosen to come so late to an event that seemed to be today only. I even felt that people might linger into the early morning after the tour was supposedly over at ten or eleven at night. Earlier segments included tours INSIDE fantastic spaces containing myriads of people in tableaux of party-goers of the past: some gowned from a century ago, some nude, hinting at just-paused orgies. I wanted to linger in some to study groups that must contain beautiful naked bodies, but pushing crowds, and clusters of people-on-display that seemed to revolve around their own centers, made it hard for me to remain an observer. Ceilings many times soared thirty or forty feet overhead---the vague memory of the former Tiffany Building across from the hotel containing Ai Fiori on Fifth Avenue and 37th Street appears to have figured heavily in the dream. At one point I was walking along a narrow shoreline, this maybe a remnant of the final scene of the Johnny Depp 1995 "Dead Man" movie I saw before bed last night, that seemed too narrow for access between an ascending cliff and a wave-cresting waterfront, but then a wooden platform appeared magically from the opposite side and splashed into the water to afford a tenuous link: at first it appeared to float just below the surface, wetting anyone who might walk on it, but then it seemed to acquire more solidity, and some in the crowd coming from the opposite direction walked toward and past me without getting wet, so I jumped to a corner and moved successfully to the next area. Many of the "shore cottages" were boarded up, maybe permanently, maybe only "for the season." Others were freshly maintained, though aged. No parks or lawns or gardens, or even curbs or actual streets, interrupted the vistas of castle upon castle receding into the distance. Again I neglect to describe rooms filled with people---many rooms that held so many people they appeared to be without any furniture whatsoever. I had the feeling this was an annual affair, and I wanted to return as frequently as I could. I wanted to sketch Rococo facades, sharply shadowed as if lit from a single 40-foot spotlight. I looked up at crowning crenelated towers drawn from the mage's castle in "Tales from Earthsea." It made Rhode Island's "castle coast" pale by comparison, and it was all, somehow, close enough for a convenient subway-ride from Manhattan. How I wanted a photographic record of HUNDREDS of these superb constructions! All different, yet all "fitting" in this generations-past setting. Oh, yes, how I want "to go to there:" a Mayazaki dream-world.
WEDNESDAY, 2/1/12: 6:46AM: I'm on my second day of a group-trip to India, sitting in the front row of an orientation, and I am growing to dislike the guide who is sitting next to me, bored with the group and the itinerary already, so he's taken to belittling the first-time travelers in his command, talking down to those who hadn't been to Patna before (though I raised my hand that I HAD been), and making a number of mistakes about the trip already. I looked at my guidebook and saw that we'd already visited two National Reserves, and I hadn't yet marked when we arrived and left them, excusing myself that this was only the second day, and the first was a short one since most of it was taken up by the arriving flight. John commented a number of times that it was really very hot already, and I sort of joked that that was only to be expected in India in late Spring. I was already worried about food, water, and fatigue, and the trip had barely started.
THURSDAY, 2/2/12: 8:32AM: I'm a new recruit in either a military unit or a science team in the jungle. I wake to go over a small hill to the latrine, and get back to see men sitting in shoe-shaped tents in the form of their seated bodies, looking at me with curiosity because I have a small cabin or room of my own. Then I'm sitting in the back seat of a car where a co-worker is trying to explain some kind of psychology to me without really answering my questions about the form of the teaching of it, and I rib him gently into being more forthcoming by saying that he's not really showing the benefits of his learning about it. Wake after 8:35 sleep, feeling almost as if I've been having fever dreams.
FRIDAY, 2/3/12: 7:23AM: I'm a supporting actor in a Broadway musical, and get a note that two of us will improvise a scene in which we meet at a dance. Then there's a special-effects sequence where another character gets into a plane for a very short flight before it explodes into bright orange flames on the ground. The scene is repeated from the point of view of the plane, a mere blur, speeding toward the explosion point at the second of ignition, and then repeated again as the plane is filmed from the center of the explosion itself. I wake feeling vaguely morbid and anxious.
SATURDAY, 2/4/12: 6:35AM: I'm a part-time free-lance employee at a company that has no work for me at the moment, so I'm using a desk in a room with four or five other desks used by sales or other transients. They know and accept me, though I'm not really part of the firm. I don't talk much, but they let me listen and sometimes comment. At times the gossip is quite revealing. A young woman seems to want to talk to a few of us in another office, and we leave the first room to come to a small stream outside that seems to be a tributary of the East River that was shallow enough to walk across to another part of the Wall Street area, but deep enough so that she was swimming, fully submerged, without seeming TOTALLY surprising, as if she'd done it before. I looked on as another woman joined her, and then waited on the other side for them to come out, dry themselves, and go into the other office for our chat.
SATURDAY, 2/11/12: 8:49AM: Long dream, details forgotten by 3:40PM, about carding (interesting typo found at 8:11AM 2/13 after typing that morning's dream and recollection of, maybe, THESE details) (the word, of course, should have been CARING) for the family idiot, and then a LONG breakfast buffet put out by Sandy Isenstein that I take many items from, thinking that it's like a luxury hotel at which I'm an honored guest.
MONDAY, 2/13/12: 7:32AM: A traveler rather like Paul McLean comes with me to southern Australia, around Victoria, where there's a river that flows north to the center of the continent, where it joins a river from the north that takes us almost to the northern coast, but there's a particular town on the west bank of the river where Paul must go to a certain house and perform a certain ritual with objects that he has to get from me. I'm given confidence that everything will transpire as it must, but there are moments of confusion when I look into one of my bedroom drawers for a glasses case from an old pair of sunglasses dating from the time when I wore contact lenses, and in this case are two items like screwdrivers that Paul must use, again as part of a definite ritual, to perform a set of actions that only he knows how to do. He expresses his typical impatience and anxiety about doing things exactly right, but I assure him that nothing can go wrong. The place-name Brisbane comes up a number of times, but not the city on the east coast that's nowhere near these two rivers that would seem to divide the continent of Australia into two islands separated by these two rivers from the south and from the north. There's another person of importance for the ritual who must be found in that northern town, but again there's the feeling of assurance that he'll be found and know what he must do to "fulfil the requirements" of the ancient ritual. I'm strongly reminded, now, of a dream from a few days ago that ended with my ensuing half-awake rumination about the importance of numbers, individual numerals, in my dreams, in my life, and in the very existence of the order of the universe. It was as if I were wakening to the possibility (or the recognition of my madness) that my obsession with indexing, with record-keeping, with the computer games of Spider and of FreeCell before that (and with the significance of the thirteen cards of the four suits of a standard deck of cards)---all had some obsessional and ritualistic and even shamanistic (not to mention Messianic) IMPORTANCE to the well-being of the continuing evolution and maintenance of my life, progressing inexorably upward to the life of the universe itself. I try not to sound portentous, but merely to transcribe as accurately as I can remember the details of the post-dream reverie that I should have recorded a few days ago, but the FEELINGS of which (rather than the exact WORDING of which) must be recorded now before they've totally escaped me. Essence of obsession! LOL: Obsession WITH the essence of the remaining memories of that particular prior post-dream rumination. The "realization" that the VERY-MOST-BASIC elements of the universe aren't quarks, or even smaller Planck-length/time as-yet-undiscovered mass-particles, but NUMERALS THEMSELVES, endlessly repeating---through an unknown number (possibly thirteen?) of dimensions---and shuffling, as in an infinitude of decks of cards with those thirteen immutable denominations). 7:58AM: Have to refer to Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science" to find the name of John Conway who invented The Game of Life in 1970---both individuals, like me, who posited an ultra-simplistic basis to all of reality and existence and possibility. Am I now finished? Rereading for the third time: yes. And then added the parentheses in Saturday's dream-record. Print this special page for Sharon at 8:18AM.
WEDNESDAY, 2/15/12: 5:02AM: Dream starts with my waiting in line for an amusement park on the south shore of Lake Erie to open, hoping to get to one of the big roller coasters for the first ride, before long lines form. The day passes without my participating in it until I'm trying to ride my bicycle home, knowing I ride east on a road that roughly follows the southern shore of the lake until I find the intersection at which I turn right to pedal south to Akron. But it's late, and I'm tired, and I feel myself pedaling automatically, almost sleeping, so that I miss my turnoff and find myself pedaling down a deteriorating road that leads back to the shore of Lake Erie, far to the east of the point at which I should have turned. I coast around the wide arc that marks the end of this road at the lake, and end up at a kind of boarding house occupied by Blacks, who look at me strangely until I ask them for help, and one of the young men volunteers to borrow a bicycle and escort me back to the point where I should turn south on the road. He's taking a while, and I encounter other dwellers who look at me with mild curiosity and even ask what I'm doing here. I end up talking with a boy of maybe five, who seems to want to entertain me by throwing around what I at first think are lampshades, but which are actually umbrellas, partly open (maybe based on some of the articles folded from paper in the movie about origami I watched yesterday), mostly in patterns of dark green and acid yellow, and I watch them until I wake up and type this until 5:12AM.
SUNDAY, 2/19/12: 8:50AM: I'm visiting a town in Germany that I wake to seem to recollect that the name of the town is Darmstadt. Look later into Google to find that it 1) is a beautiful little (100,000 people) German tourist town in Hesse, near the Frankfurt Airport, 2) has the element darmstatium (#110) named after it because it and five or six other elements in the 100s were first fabricated there, 3) housed the first formulation of MDMC (or whatever Ecstasy is!), 4) has a zoo and botanic garden and swimming pools and two music festivals attracting hundreds of thousands of people, 5) and has the Waldspirale, a Hundertwasser-inspired (or created by his son?) 104-apartment complex opened in 2000 with no rectangular element anywhere. In my dream, I wander a lovely street and am attracted to a house-museum, where I enter, take off all my clothes, and in a beautiful idealized body I wander the rooms to find elegant business offices featuring walls of four 50-inch TVs from top to bottom, sitting rooms with photos that live with pastoral scenes within, outside to find a garden-museum with parts of the owner's former collections: miniature landscapes, copies of Roman ruins, tables of ivory knickknacks, gatherings of shells and gemstones and souvenirs, and a path that lures me toward an idyllic forest venue that I decide will take me too far, naked, from my belongings. Return to the building and try to see how I can increase my stay here, and wake to decide that the name in my mind was Darmstadt, and find from Google that it may in fact have "called out to me" in some way, because it's now definitely in my mind as a place to visit and spend ACTUAL dream-like time in.
MONDAY, 2/20/12: 9:27AM: Two fragments from hours ago: 1) I'm manipulating a pile of data that's literally a small hill of STUFF, and numbers slide out to the edge to make the hill lower, and then regather to build up the hill. 2) A friend berates me for not having sex with some young guy, and I agree that he has wonderful legs---like Crixus in "Spartacus," but I'm not really interested in going to bed with him because his face really doesn't turn me on.
TUESDAY, 2/21/12: 4:41AM: Business-awards dinner-drink settings for a specific honoree/year of employment are debated and shuffled around until correct.
THURSDAY, 2/23/12: 4:58AM: I get KILLING mad at a guy who lets woman AHEAD of me into a john which I had a hard time finding, and was ready to enter when someone ELSE was allowed in before me. I'd looked at many messed-up ones, maybe a memory of the awful latrines in Haiti in that documentary a week ago?
SATURDAY, 2/25/12: 7:02AM: I'm rehearsing, maybe for a TV show, with an actress as talented and insecure as Liza Minelli, and we have to come up with most of our costumes and direction. I give some advice on how presentations should be symmetric and interesting, like listings in a program. I can't think of what I'm going to wear, but then she presents me with a garment that's like a black, full-body pullover sweater without any arms, maybe based on the ludicrous black skirt that David Hallberg wore in his solo last night at "Kings of the Dance." I figure I can make this work in many good ways: my body is rather like it is now, not young and shapely as it should be for a performance like the one I'm expected to put on this evening. I venture out of our private rehearsal space into the hanger-like environs of our studio: hundreds of people as on a factory floor engaged in production construction and management. I ask some foreign-looking military men where the men's room is, and they don't understand, until a handsome worker says it's on the other side of the building. I go over there and find doorways labeled in German, but there may be kitchens and offices, but I can't find a men's room. Ask someone else, and he offers to lead me there, but not before I pass a vat of raw meat and see a piece of steak that I lop off to broil for lunch, since no other facilities seem obvious in this factory environment. Move off to another area, hopeful.
SUNDAY, 2/26/12: 5:56AM: 1) Mom's driving and REFUSES to park in a good place RIGHT AT church, also "just missing" several other spaces grabbed by more aggressive parkers. 2) I'm putting slips of stock trades in index, marked by different prices at market highs. RECORD my servant saying: "My skin is PERFECT, which means I'm IMMORTAL," said when he's DYING, reminding me of my comment to Steve Hayes: "If I were DYING in six months, I could EAT anything, STOP going to the gym, and travel EVERYWHERE, because I wouldn't need to SAVE so much money." But then think: why couldn't I live AS IF I would die in a few minutes?
TUESDAY, 2/28/12: 1) 8:15AM: Spartacus has helped me with an index on the UN, and I don't know how I'm going to finish putting it together for the customer. 2) 10:35AM: I'm staying in Dennis's basement apartment, and when I finish some work at his desk, I go to pee and find the cleaning lady on her knees on the floor of the bathroom. Wait a moment and she's gone, leaving the door open and a strange light on inside, and when I pee, it's a cloud of misty yellow that I'm depressed is going to remove all evidence of her cleaning. Send water to both sides of the yellow-filled drain to try to clean it up a bit. Then, without transition, I'm outside, looking at a kid trying to play in viscous mud, and I get my feet muddy trying to get away from him, saying, "Clearly the mud will do what it wants to do." Also have to move a conglomerate of packing cases taped together to cover some kind of construction site. Have to pack my suitcase, almost full already with my old briefcase in a strange blue cloth bag, and think how I can leave the suitcase in my hotel room later and travel outside with only my shoulder bag, which will just fit into the jammed suitcase. The colors (of the pee) and stickiness (of the mud) were EXTREMELY vivid!
FRIDAY, 3/2/12: 1) 4:53AM: Dream of ornithologist carving two sets of long-tailed birds and one pair with SUPER-LONG (two foot) tails. 2) I'm taking seasoned crackers that are being baked crispy in an open oven.
SATURDAY, 3/3/12: 6AM: Four of us are vacationing in the west, and the other couple are going to visit Red Mountain, which it turns out is "down" from where we are camping. I say I'm going too, just to take a few pictures, but I'm not sure if my camera batteries are charged. My friend is shirtless and dripping wet from doing something with our car, and I don't know if he'll be coming or not. It'll be getting dark soon, and I have no idea whether there'll be enough light, but I think if I can just hook up my batteries to the charger for a few minutes, they'll get enough energy for five or six pictures, which might be enough for my documentation of our jaunt. Obviously I'm thinking about our Italy trip in 15 days.
SUNDAY, 3/4/12: 7:31AM: Repeat dream of contacting a user as a drug contact in jail. Something else about singing; details forgotten.
WEDNESDAY, 3/7/12: 6:06AM: Standing next to another man in a white shirt and black pants to greet parents of a young Black who wrote for New Yorker and whose funeral we're attending.
SATURDAY, 3/10/12: 7:21AM: 1) I watch as a friend runs to cross a double lane of traffic at night, and from the right I see a car without lights coming at great speed. I shout "Watch out!" loudly, and my friend DIVES across the roadway in an effort to avoid being hit, but he flops against the far curb, throws up his hands in despair, and vanishes down a gaping sewer opening. I blame myself for his accident, and his back is lacerated by the sides of the sewer, while he falls on his head for some terrible, as-yet-unrealized damage. 2) Another friend drinks from one of a number of glasses, some clean, some actually diseased, and he dryly jokes that he'll now find out whether the fact that he's already had some terrible disease will make him immune to another attack from the same viruses. Again, I feel just awful, in some way responsible.
SUNDAY, 3/11/12: 8:32AM: I'm moving into a new apartment, advised by friends, and look at a wall covered in a fabric that extends over the height of the partition and flops down in two peaks that have no support. Envy two friends who sleep nude next to each other, and they're not interested in me at all. Other details forgotten.
MONDAY, 3/12/12: 7:48AM: Have to Google Alan Cumming to find his first name and proper surname spelling. I'm in a kind of school assembly with hordes of students in front of a stage where a performer takes off his shirt and backs up against a spout of tar that coats his back, and he stoops so that it starts to cover his muscular front, and my hopes rise (indeed!) when he reaches down into his trousers as if he's going to become completely naked and covered in tar. I'm with a friend who's gay and feeling his companion's nipples, so that when he lies down across seats beside me, I tweak HIS nipples, and then he's totally naked and I make bold to touch his blond, hairless genitals, and he smiles, but I'm too self-conscious to continue. Then the crowd clears out and I realize that the tray in which I'd put some belongings is now emptied, though I check and my pockets still have my wallet, change purse, camera, and magazine, but my friend grimaces and says, "Yeah, my iPod's gone." Brief, odd, intense dream, which includes a line of bug bites like I had on my leg earlier today.
TUESDAY, 3/13/12: 1) 5:48AM: I'm with a group of well-off artists in a luxuriant countryside that is reminiscent of 19th Century France, though it's contemporary and everyone is speaking English. Artists have been passing around postcard-sized reproductions of their work, which may be in oil, a print, or even a reduced photograph, and I'm attracted to one that contains a mid-photo black triangle (maybe a shadow of a building, or an oddly colored segment of street pavement) that I'd like to somehow pay tribute to, either by making an oil painting impression of it, or enlarging it and emphasizing this black triangle in an artistic way. But then I somehow LOSE it, and search other collections of these reproductions in vain, and think I may have left it in a nearby village when I had a sample of a combination of two cheeses that I thought the TASTE of would revolutionize the cheese industry of this area if I could just reconstruct that specific combination of hard red and soft white cheeses. Typical "loss" dream in an atypical setting. 2) 9:21AM: I'm in a vehicle with a group of travelers going toward Mumbai, and I ask the guide if we're actually going THROUGH the city, but he replies that we're going around it to get to our actual destination north of it. We stop for lunch at what turns out to be an island created for such purposes, and I immediately go to one of the edges, stopping abruptly as the ground stops abruptly, to see schools of small fish swooping by in a very camera-ready mode. I stare as a few larger fish appear, and then a twenty-foot-long centipede-like sea-shrimp swims by and clearly recognizes that I'm looking down at him in the water with astonishment. He stops, turns back, and rears out of the water---like a dream, is all I can think of---and almost beckons me to come closer. When I do, he clamps his chitinous jaw on my foot, hard enough to hurt but not injure or damage the shoe, and waves an upper claw in an obvious demand for ransom of my foot in the form of some kind of food or, even, who knows, money. I manage to wrench my foot free and face a handsome 50ish man sitting on a porch surveying the scene, who says something to me in Hindi. I say that I don't speak Hindi, and he responds in clear English, though I don't remember what he says. I have the desire to race back to the bus to get my camera to photograph this phenomena, but in my eagerness I (this IS a dream) take his little camera and put it in my mouth as I turn to run to the bus, only to turn back after a dozen steps, embarrassed that I've purloined HIS camera, and take it out of my mouth and try to wipe my copious saliva from it to hand it back to him. I kept the plastic case, anyway, dry in my other hand. Then wake and marvel I've slept so long.
WEDNESDAY, 3/14/12: 8:26AM: Marathon-length dream: I'm vacationing in Paris at the home on Butte Monmartre of the woman who escorted Ken and me on the cave trip, whose name I try to come up with in the dream and am content that it starts with Francoise, though I'm not sure that's the case, because the surname that keeps coming to mind is Dorleac, and that's only the movie-star sister of---and I strain for HER name: the most famous French star, the face of Marianne, the star of "Repulsion," and the names Bejart, Prejean, Simone---I can SEE her face in ads---Dominique, Miriamne---look up "Repulsion" in movie book to find---Catherine Deneuve! But I'm no closer to the cave-trip leader's name; ON with the dream! Many people are in the room as we're all trying to get breakfast before leaving for the day to visit Paris. Some very thin fried eggs are passed around, and we're all centered around a sleek toaster that only toasts a single slice. I find a puffy pita bread with a large number of paper labels pasted to various surfaces, but pull them all off and stuff the thick bread into the toaster right after the last slice is pulled out. Move to another part of the room, and there's a period of uncertainty before I go back to the toaster and find that someone has taken it. Ask people around, and some guy volunteers to take me to the current location of the toaster. We leave the room, the building, and even Montmartre, going through narrow, crowded streets in a maze that I'm not really following. An interlude has me mixing wax with cotton in an attempt to make earplugs to keep out the noise of the city that I don't want to hear. We end up in a crowded room in which I know no one, and even forget the face of the fellow who led me here. I begin to experience the anxiety that I'll never get back to Montmartre, except that I have the confidence that it's a small enough area in Paris that, once I get there, I'll be able to ask for---lacking the right name: Francoise, and find my way back to where I started. Get to a crowded intersection and know that I have to go either right or left at the T-crossing, depending on which way Montmartre is, and have SOME degree of confidence when I wake, body jittering with what I can only attribute to anxiety over the Italy trip starting in four days, so I take a valium and start typing at 8:26AM and finish at 8:41AM. Go to cave trip to find "Laurence," and by the time I finish searching her surname, Beasley, finally enters my addled brain. Some small satisfaction at 8:53AM.
SUNDAY, 3/18/12: 7:36AM: Ken and I are riding in the back seat of a taxi down an old street in what looks to be a suburb in Chicago, and the old houses on either side of the street are captivating to me, though they leave him cold. One in particular impresses me: it's mostly a ruin: a vine- and moss-covered lower floor of brick that almost fills the smallish lot, but on the second or third floor is the remnant of an enormous white room that takes up the whole floor, while above that, on both sides, tower two narrow pillars that would imply that the upper story, or stories, were high-ceilinged chambers of enormous elegance, reaching a summit with a delicate brick arch that would have capped the entire edifice with splendor. I bend low in the seat to see the top of the ruin, almost invisible in its height, and try to persuade Ken to have a look at it, but he adapts his "couldn't be bothered" attitude and misses it. We later pass a warren of impassable streets that look marvelously attractive for wandering, but we merely drive into a restaurant at the edge of this ghetto and have something to eat, while I fantasize wandering its alleys for delighted hours.
ITAPUGLI DREAMS
TUESDAY, 3/20/12: 5:09AM: Maybe inspired by the disparate cliques in Piazza Bellini last night, I'm in a kind of ashram with many people in a large house, mainly trying to think of ways of networking to raise money. Someone has an idea for a restaurant offering special meals, and a small group brainstorms about chefs, menus, advertising, presentations, and ways of getting the hardware for the meal together. One of the participants is deaf, and I among others are concerned with how to bring her more closely into the group. At one point it rains, with water beating against the windows, and the deaf girl, who's never seen rain in this building before, jumps to the conclusion that someone upstairs is leaking water from the bath down the side of the building, and we all gather to take her onto a screened-in porch to enjoy the feel of the freshness from the rain and other manifestations of the rain. My idea is somewhat based on zolnerzone, but I've had experience before in linking with Facebook and Twitter and when someone wants to start some kind of local paper, I think I can offer advice. The Martha Cardona Opera Theater also comes to mind, where I felt sorry for Cardona's son in starting an opera theater in Brooklyn Heights, where Brooklyn already has at least two budding opera companies: I primarily feel SORRY for his efforts which will probably not succeed. Yet in THIS group, there's a great energy, a lot of participatory activity, and there's a greater feeling of HOPE that the odd enterprises thought of by THIS group will bear more fruit because of the youth, vigor, and enthusiasm of the people gathered in this house. I even feel more confidence in what I want to do with an extension of the publicity for my website. Positive, enthusiastic dream, with pleasant people in it, and feel rather good finishing typing now at 5:20AM, not yet 24 hours in Italy!
WEDNESDAY, 3/21/12: 1) 2:29AM: I've done something wrong with scheduling my TV-program recording, and have to fix it by gradually eliminating programs from either the start or the end until the system can reset itself to work OK. Other details forgotten. 2) Pleasant memory of a dream with some accomplishment, but just can't recall details that I'd wanted to record about half an hour ago. Useless entry?
THURSDAY, 3/22/12: 1:02AM: 1) I'm into an airport wanting a taxi, and one of the drivers comes and stands VERY close to me, and I say, "Are you just being friendly, or do you want to take me where I'm going?" 2) I have to unite three references to someone on two different days into a single reference, and I manage by only slight edits and logical connections. 4:36AM: 3) I'm at a kind of "ultimate Nirvana" session, with the "world's champions" of extreme enlightenment. Some woman is going farther and farther out, reporting higher and higher visions, while acolytes record her transmissions. Two others are immersed in dark pools of fluid---amniotic fluid if not simple water---mouths only above floating masses of hair---one seems to be Yoko Ono, another Kei Takei, and they come out to---relax?---maybe every twelve hours or so. Another seems to have found the way of propagating his method by giving anyone who wants his lessons TWO copies of his book, one to use for oneself, one to pass on to someone else to repeat the same pattern with the same book. I'm there either---or both---as an ultimate reporter of these farthest-out states, as the ultimate state-goer, "leading" the "followers"---or "goading" the "sheep"---to ever-wierder/weirder oddnesses. Kei and Ono almost seem to have dissolved themselves into their beingnesses; others are so far beyond communication they're merely globes of essence barely touching on the material level. The quest goes on. My dream touches down at my fingertips. My nose drips and my fatigue lifts as I sleep for three hours, then for three-and-a-half hours, and now to flush away my pee, blow away my nasal drips, and return to bed for more Crystal-White light (within a Ring-Pass-Not) and hope to cure my cold and restore my energy before the wake-up call at 7:30AM. Finish typing at 4:46AM. 7:32AM: 4) I'm sitting in a train station with others, and there's a flash from outside and three people are lying in various positions. I think one of the women may be moving, but I quite definitely tell myself, "I am NOT going to touch those bodies," because the likely scenario is that they touched some kind of high-tension wires and are alive with electricity. No one else seems inclined to go toward them either, and I sit, stunned, not knowing what to do. More events probably happened, but I don't remember anything more.
FRIDAY, 3/23/12: 1) 5:23AM: I'm directing a movie, and the producer has demanded that I get rid of one character and change the plot so that some specific incident happens two scenes earlier than had been called for in the script. I don't know how I'll make these changes, but eventually I do. 2) 9:31AM: Two dreams with me sort of overseeing the development of a scientist, or the progress of a musical quartet. In the second, the second violinist goes off into a strange and beautiful solo, while the other three instrumentalists chat quietly among themselves in a way I think slightly disrespectful for their colleague's brilliance.
SATURDAY, 3/24/12: 5:41AM: I'm watching a film or TV program about a silent disaster: the only image is a sad teacher reading from a list of students, or a stack of packets: the names of those who have died. All the other students react with sadness at each name, and the parents and friends cry as they learn there's no hope for the survival of so many of their children and cohorts. The envelopes with the names of the dead seem to light up with their bad news and fade back to normal when the name is read, as if verifying the truth of the passing. There's no great outcry, just a slow and steady listing of the roster of the dead, whether from a plague or other natural disaster. A quiet and profoundly sad dream. These events are also taking slightly different forms in different neighborhoods or even in different nations and languages.
MONDAY, 3/26/12: 5:30AM: At first the dream was only a simple work dream: I had to do an index of a female poet's life, with special entries for the titles of her poems that included the year of their first publication, and possible elaborations for future publications or other annotations that would become clearer as the manuscript proceeded through successive readings by various levels of editorial supervisors. But at the first I was merely concerned with how I could isolate the titles from their alphabetical listings and automatically insert the header "Poetry" that would precede the index entries for the SUBENTRIES of the poetry titles. Discussions of this work, and how and where I would do it, gradually transformed into mini-dramas with OTHER authors (or indexers---this came, I think, from Allan's remark about "Joy of Indexing" from my card that I gave him at dinner last night). One was, bizarrely, only a head that moved around the polished top of a desk or table-top, increasing the sheen of the wooden surface. The head became connected to a body that had to be manipulated in a particular way to get the needed work from the limbs of the body. Others became gradually involved, first as a kind of audience, then as participants in their own micro-drama: in particular, a young, sexy blond in just the briefest bathing suit, muscular body gleaming with oil or sweat, who tensed up and flexed his chest muscles so that his entire body became a seductive concave surface that he DEMANDED be filled with MY body, now also almost naked and in the glorious shape of youth, to facilitate HIS production for what has now become either a mysterious literary project or an avant-garde theater-of-the-absurd production. I was proud to be included in this "new thing," not to mention terribly turned on (though emotionally, not physically) by the corporeal contact with such a beautiful mass of flesh, muscle, and perfectly proportioned distributions of light red-blond hair---all under a most handsome athlete's face. As his demands for attention increased, my efforts to fulfill those intentions magnified, until it became a literal physical orgy, though, again, not primarily a SEXUAL orgy, but an INTELLECTUAL accomplishment channeled through corporeal activity of the most sensual qualities. Remember later to add that I was using an IBM-type computer that seemed to be swimming in a pool of water on my desk-top that I was concerned would make its way up the base of the machine and into the electrical mechanism. A stunning dream I've barely given adequate words to. Finish typing at 5:43AM, hand towel over my shoulders to keep warm in the john of the Nicotel in Barleta, Puglia, Italy.
TUESDAY, 3/27/12: 1) 2:58AM: I'm watching a terrible TV program about violence done to Blacks by Blacks: one sequence had a gang dropping a Black's bare leg into a leg-sized manhole, inflicting hideous pain while the camera lingered on the Black's agonized face. Other episodes surrounded that one, but it was the only one I remembered distinctly. 2) 6:39AM: ANOTHER gargantuan dream of my-imagination-populated terrain over which I have to travel to get back home: this time the first part aimed at getting me to 6th Avenue and 34th Street in an antediluvian Manhattan, so that I could "transfer" to an unknown subway that moves up 6th Avenue in safety from the monsters below that. I went in various bodies of water that started pristine and turned fetid and rank with death and stench; I encountered gangs of bodybuilders who alternately seduced and threatened me. Enemies shape-shifted from good to bad to good at my whim, helping and hindering me, all with a richness that my mind conjured moment-by-moment as I moved northward in my dream. No buildings, no modern amenities---maybe I'm thinking of my trip through southern Italy?! Got to get back to bed now at 6:45AM, with the 7AM wake-up call imminent.
WEDNESDAY, 3/28/12: 12:34AM: Quasi-profound dream of the world caught in a dilemma: the father of a would-be bride must decide whether to kill his daughter directly or decide on a one-in-ten chance that a particular letter of the alphabet, first from A to I, then from J to T, then from U to whatever---when pressed BY the bride, would set off a megaton nuclear warhead that would destroy a large part of the Arctic region and make it lethally radioactive for thousands of years. The father has been made to feel guilty that he has chosen to endanger the ecosystems of the world in order to save his daughter's life, but it all somehow "doesn't work." The crux of the choice is a multi-stanza poem that tells of a young man asked a critical question, and his response to the question, but neither the verse nor the outcome from the response to the question, really make any sense. Again, an odd, quasi-profound, dream.
THURSDAY, 3/29/12: 1) 1:05AM: I'm going with Mildred to the top of some mountain to get evidence for some court case she's pursuing, and she climbs into an attic and won't come down, even after her lawyer threatens to quit the case because it's 5:35PM and NO ONE can force him to work after hours. She stays up anyway, and when we get back to the bus she refuses to sit where she should, and we're four hours late getting to the bottom of the mountain. 2) 4:49AM: TERRIBLE nightmare, actually in two parts: a) I look outside from a window at my childhood home, where I'm still living with Mom, but it's not really 1221 Dietz. She's pouring some kind of cement into a trench that she's dug, or had dug for her, in the back lawn. I can't figure what she's doing until I open the door from my bedroom and find the whole area outside my bedroom under construction: she's removed the walls of the hallway so that the bathroom now sits as an isolated room in her enlarged bedroom, which is now the largest room in the house. "How can you do this?" I ask her, and she only glares at me. I continue, "You mean I have to go into your bedroom if I want to go to the toilet?" No answer. I wonder where she got the time and money to do---or have done---something like this. But before this nightmare can "get serious," the SECOND part starts: b) I'm living in a poor, violent area of far Brooklyn, and Carolyn is angry at me for some reason, and has hired thugs to make my life miserable. I try to look through a stack of telephone books for the police number to call for Brooklyn, but the dream changes into my trying to get on the G train to get away from her hired men chasing me, and I go down a stairway, asking "Is this the way to the G train?" They say yes as we move through paths beneath the station, and it's clear they're trying to sneak onto the train without paying. "Is this train going toward Manhattan or away from it?" I ask, and they mumble something about not knowing until they see the direction it's going, and I realize to my horror that they're going to take me to some apartment to terrorize me rather than lead me onto the subway. Without transition, I'm in that apartment, and one of three or four middle-aged men approaches me with something like cheese smeared onto the palms of his hands, seeming to complain that, look, I cut myself. I try to sympathize until I realize he's just threatening me, and I start to plead along the lines of "What did I ever do to you?" and "Why are you doing this to me?" They never answer, only close in menacingly, and I wake filled with revulsion about the situation, and pick up my glasses and watch and Neo and go into the bathroom to pee and type this to 5:01AM, sorry that it's not closer to the wake-up call at 7:15AM. The nightmare is so sickeningly real without the climaxing relief IN the dream that it is only a dream.
FRIDAY, 3/30/12: 4:53AM: 1) I'm reading a part in a four-character play, and it goes very well until at the end the audience is asked which of the characters it believed was telling the truth, and I wasn't being believed. Then we extended the play somehow, yet it was still finished just before 8:30PM, and I had a chance to go down the block and see another play that I had a ticket for. 2) ---I KNOW there was another dream---ah, yes: I'm watering a very large plant which is sitting in a cardboard box balanced on a swinging platform suspended from the ceiling. I have a large quantity of water to pour in, and I heedlessly pour ALL of it into the box, watching the level rise to the very rim of the cardboard, evenly on all sides, and then ABOVE the rim, and for a moment I hope that's all that will happen, but then, to my dismay, water begins to seep down the undersides of the lip-flaps of the box, which extend out to one side which has dipped lower than the other sides, and I watch as beadlets of water flow along the gently downsloping edges, reach the corner, and, rather than falling, begin to DESCEND, as if on spiders' webs of invisible threads. At the same time, the added weight causes the whole box to start sliding toward me, and I'm glad I remained watching so that I could try to level the box in an attempt to prevent it sliding off the support and crashing to the floor. But even before the thread-suspended droplets lowered by as much as a half-inch, I woke.
SATURDAY, 3/31/12: 1) 3:17AM: I'm in a gay bath and someone like Bob R. "sends me a gift" of a guy who at first keeps his cock squeezed between his legs and thus inaccessible, but a few moments later he's lying on the floor with his engorged cock exposed, and I can't resist handling his purple-red cock-head, and it comes copiously with the merest touch, and I feel very excited by that. 2) 5:43AM: I'm staying in a room at a YMCA that has only a few hours left in my rental, and I decide to put on my bathrobe and cruise a bit before I check out. Just as I'm about to leave my room, a woman comes in with some clerical stuff on a few pieces of paper and leaves it on my bed. "What is this?" I ask her. "Either you pay for the room, or it's not your room any more," she says haughtily. I don't quite know what to do, put the clerical stuff on the floor, and wake, frustrated.
SUNDAY, 4/1/12: 5:52AM: Melange of images, starting from a military crazy person lobbing eight missiles into the Hudson River from the Palisades: these are designed to melt metal and destroy a foreign nation, but since he was not permitted to test them, he's determined in his madness to shoot them off anyway, and buildings on both sides of the river, a la the movie "2012," begin to melt and flow into the river, causing the heroes of this movie to run along the crumbling sides, and then inside rooms, and then other sides of the buildings as they curl, melting, into the river. Another part of the dream involved some papers documenting the damage from this, requiring more special effects of disasters that almost wipe out the world but fail to destroy the heroes and their compatriots. The dream was clearer than the retelling. Oh, yes, it BEGAN with images of increasingly large piles of hair, surmounted by my wallet, change purse, and watch, that Ken put atop the piles of hair that he somehow got out of the shower that I hadn't cleaned after I used it. THIS image was repeated with a far LARGER pile of hair and other debris onto which he piled my shoulder bag and some other possessions. Total madness.