DREAMS FROM 1960s
Most of my dreams prior to the 1980s are included in my daily journals and my trip journals. Only exceptional dreams were dated during the 1950s and 1960s.
June, 1963
Weird dream snatches:
1. Falling or jumping into middle of bridge and finding it isn't built and falling through, with stumble, to road below and walking away dazedly.
2. Watching something sitting next to a gorgeous fey child and having him turn to me saying "You're probably the most intelligent, most desirable person here."
3. Afterward talking to the boxer (?) we were watching and he being told "his lover, that boy, was waiting for him."
4. Seeing a fire above a street and buildings, and turning a corner and seeing the flames as being very CLOSE and hot.
5. Alone at Dietz and a car drives up and a lone figure gets out to stalk me.
6. I wave screwdriver at him through Mom's bedroom window and he backs off, falling over porch railing.
7. He creeps up front steps as I scrabble with phone button to come UP, when I telephone operator (and no dial tone) for police.
October, 1963
Strange dream---sitting in a park, daylight, people around, and I seem to know it's in ENGLAND (though never been there). Black blob appears in the sky, and gets closer, revealing toad-like creatures with tiny eyes and huge stomach flaps. Sits in front of bench next to me, only inches from calm observer's face, and opens soundless mouth gaping wide. People are mildly frightened, but look on with interest. The mouth is huge, pleasantly curved and glowing pink, with some sort of mild steam, as if inside his mouth was cold, and moist air condensed them. Another came flying in, trailing a huge black veil, and I was glad one didn't land in front of ME, though I was curious to look inside that luminous mouth. Scene shifts to inside a castle, and these monsters and people, mostly servants, waiting for "the bride." The bride draws closer, now dark outside and I'm relieved to see a WHITE blob---at least the bride's not a monster. Elevator near me comes down, and I expect, strangely, the king and queen, but servants get out, all idiotic or mad, a giant Negro woman staring fixedly, her red-colored lips slack to a catatonic "O" in the shining chocolate face. They rush past and down the stairs and elevator car only goes down and as I close the door I see clearly the polished wood and reflective brass fittings on the door. Bride looms closer and I expect either great beauty or hideousness, but a close-eyed, cross-eyed, pale-faced, orange-haired maiden, probably a moron, slips frantically past, inquiring about the elevator, then runs out behind me. Then dream shifts to my guest of last night, Bob Teitel, and we're sleeping on a sofa, tangled in sheets, together, and various hand holds and shoulders pats and head-lolls portend sex, but I have vague feeling of reluctance, and wake.
DREAMS FROM 1964
I'm having sex with someone in my house in Ohio, who insists on boosting me up to suck me, but my head hits the ceiling, and I see myself with an ugly squint on my face from the pain.
I'm having sex with someone particularly nice in a strange house in the country. A light goes on in the hall when I look up, and I hear someone in the bathroom. I'm sure it's my bedroom and bath in Ohio. I continue, hoping "whoever it is" won't notice. As "she" leaves, I hear her voice: "Be sure you never come here to do it again."
DREAMS FROM 1965
1. Amazing how architecture figures in recent dreams: that first amazing theater with a stage so small that 90% of the seats couldn't even SEE the stage what with low balconies, side walls, etc. Doubtless inspired by odd angles of STUBS diagram of Blackstone Theater in Chicago, or Studebaker Theater in Chicago. Then on day after Rita's graduation, inspired no doubt by Firestone School auditorium: the odd theater in which I dreamed I "did" Peter O'Toole, who had the oddest arrowhead-like cock with serrated edges and hardly any head. It was STILL good, though.
2. Two crazy dreams in one night: Atom bursts around mountain-ringed lake. People from AU around (Joe Serrano) and Joan Sumner, whispers that the plane that lands on the water is a "deep diver." Then there's a review, ala 1984, and the enemy scoffs and someone speaking and makes a remark about the next speaker---me. Something's wrong with my uniform, so it's taken off and put on, boots are cut down to slippers, and ropes of red, white, blue, and black are separated and cut. ODD?
3. Odd dream about Dave Albro (or Murray Eisenman?) and looking at writing about "Buffalo Terminator" as some sort of Simulator written in/for Buffalo.
4. Riding bus down Second Avenue, suddenly, by an incredible transposition, the bus is traveling south on BROWN Street, and the storefronts become terrifyingly ambiguous.
DATELESS DREAMS FROM 1965
1. Wait on line for the "GE" exhibit at the World's Fair, a huge fun house, to be entered by walking through three concrete doorways, painted colorfully. The holes narrow and one is forced to sit, and the passage becomes a slide, flowing through intestinal twistings. I weave from side to side, seeming to "feel" which way to go; curving, not to the other sides where non-curved boxes seem to be dead ends. It gets darker and I feel the old funhouse fear, but slide dustily down onto tractor-like links of tracks, and somehow I get on the wrong side, and hang from the bottom, while others sit in cars on top. It's comfortable hanging, though.
2. I walk away from boat (?) in park (?) in early morning. Negro comes alongside and I fear violence. He slides along and strikes up conversation, and I talk haltingly, trying to shift away before Altman box, from which souvenirs slide, breaks. I say I have nothing of value, but I realize he sees my Omega watch (this is on MON PM after typing TRW on Sunday). He grimaces and puts a finger toward me. I bite it and through it, like Styrofoam poured around my Broxodent. He feels no pain and puts in other hand. I shudder and bite down on tubular stuffed fingers and I feel more fear and disgust than he does. I fantasize jumping into the water to get away, but see him floating in gray-green depths near me, still a menace.
3. Strange nightmare of hideously involved test---nun passing out multitudinous forms, going A,A,A,B,B,C,C, tests closely printed, with clues and sub-clues, diagrammatic answers with enigmatic symbols and diagrams, and I work a LONG time on first answer and get inkling of letters to put in blank and nun asks, joking, "You know, what color is his testosterone," and I look and THAT'S the answer, and try to fuss with first letter, and next form is being passed out. Horrifying.
DREAMS FROM 1966
Obviously inspired by a photo in the Sunday Times of the framework of the new Madison Square Garden going up in metallic rings, and the knowledge that they'll be tearing the Metropolitan Opera House down: I'm at the last performance of the Met, but it's somehow past that, since the top part is already reduced to girders. Only the lower two rings are still standing, and these are below ground, somehow, so that I can creep up to some woven-wire fences in the crumbling archways and peer DOWN to some sort of final performance, and I manage to get inside and everyone is running around elaborate red and gold spiral staircases stripping everything of value. Someone tears past me and starts detaching lamp fixtures from the wall, but I look at them objectively and say, "But I have a little black lamp at home like that, so who needs this one---hardly anything unique to take from the Met." Again I'm outside and dusk is falling, and everyone's leaving the old hulk in dimness behind. Walk down palatial steps, rather resembling the ones at the Public Library, and in the center (or maybe the stairs could be in front of Low Library at Columbia) is an old statue of some sort of Buddha, and the old blue-violet paint is vaguely iridescent in the dark, but the statues are crumbled and I catch one sultry half-closed eye, and vague impression of paste jewels, and the hand, formerly upraised in the teaching position, attracts my attention. I pick it out of the rubble, and there are two fingers together which come apart into single fingers as I pick them up. I think "Now this is certainly unique," and I vaguely remember at the end showing the fingers to someone, and they're vaguely appreciative, and I feel very happy that I've gotten a unique souvenir from the Metropolitan Opera House.
DREAMS FROM 1967
The dream that had been so enormously detailed at 9 am was obviously somewhat the worse for wear at 4 pm, but some of the details could still be enumerated. There was this enormous house of prostitution, and the admission charge was only $5, and I scoffed that it could be very nice but went in anyway. There were large halls (like entrance ways in old NYC buildings) leading off into areas separated off by gauze, through which women in rather stylized attitudes of reading, upsweeping their hair, looking into mirrors, could be seen. My room number was out through a rather weedy garden, and into another apartment-type building, and again the gauze partitions with room numbers attached. When I got close to my number, an attendant (shades of Copacabana Palace) said that MY number was all the way on the OTHER side. Somehow that led me to the front door, where I exited to an evening street, and down a few doors was an elaborate sign "Teleny" (which I recognized for the book title), and lined in front were the typical gay types waiting to get in. The street was crowded with cars, and some of the people were gasping "Oh, look" at the horizon. Turning, I saw an "over Hudson River" type of view with a fireball, like fireworks, falling over the other shore. They gasped that war was here. I thought the fireball fell far away, but looking to the horizon again, I saw flames and timbers of houses burning and collapsing. I felt safe, because I had elaborate gray-and-black-and-white maps in a book which said (particularly for the state of Arizona) where the good and bad sections were as a result of the war. I felt so lucky that I
DREAMS FROM 1968
Taking a long trip, alone, by many flights on a number of mid-sized planes. Three-legged trip, as I recall, but last one remembered with most detail. Get into "plane" like bus after stop and my seat was taken. Bus dark and very crowded. Sometimes one person took two seats. Everyone was talking, and I was alone. No one I wanted to be with---married couples and unpleasant single people. Walked back in bus when my seat was taken, and passed THREE people in a seat, man and two old laughing ladies. Heard remark about "She's NOT very nice" and look across to see colored girl in VERY short yellow dress sitting impossibly in seat with skirt way up on legs. I get to empty section of bus and see a single fellow in seat and sit myself in seat (third) near him. It's VERY narrow, but I'm proud I have narrow hips and can sit in it. Then the section seems to widen, and I see we're sitting in opposite corners of the back of the bus, raised like in Greyhounds, and I look around and am happy to see that the sound from the crowds in front doesn't come into the back, but am annoyed because the windows are dirty. Surprised to see that the bus shape is NOT asymmetrical, and I think "Clever, they try to make this look like something OTHER than a bus by making it asymmetric" as I try to get to sleep. After a while, the vehicle stops and we have to leave. I gather small case and box on top and man leading off says "You asked me to fill out a questionnaire and give a donation, but I didn't fill it out except to say "I am a member of the society of professional programmers,"" and he laughed. I didn't like it, but I WAS with his group, though I sympathized with OTHER
October 10, 1968
I'm standing on Mill in front of the old Colonial Theater in Akron, and someone's next to me, oddly stooping in a store doorway, dressed casually in blue jeans with no appreciable crotch, and asks "Want to go home with me?" I say "No" and he's immediately leaving, and I change it to "Yes." He smiles and motions me to a car with three others already inside, none of them terribly gay looking, and instantly we're in front of an old fraternity-type house on a hill near, I know, the university, so I think "This is very convenient." In to a second-floor landing area, with third floor rooms looking onto it, an enormous space with pieces of furniture, and people everywhere, friendly, but more like one enormous family. His mother comes from somewhere, and there're pieces of introduction, but the whole feeling is one of "Here's the house, you can see that everyone is using it, have a ball." I begin searching for some place where we can be alone, scanning the walls, but see that all the rooms are occupied, all the alcoves are open to view. The house is not old-looking inside, but sketchily rebuilt: some of it is new unpainted wood, some of it is pieces splintered and sagging out, yet it all fits in somehow, so that there's a unified feeling about it, not unpleasant, not luxurious, but primarily THERE. Then I wake, feeling rather disappointed that it's not a place that I would have a chance to get to know better.
November 12, 1968
The weekend of November 9-10 had been spectacular because of the first Aureon Encounter, and November 11 was a day filled with nothing because of my exhaustion from the weekend. Just before going to bed I read Beardsley's "Under the Hill." With that framework, I dreamed I was in bed with a blond, slender man, who was passively placing his beautiful nude body here and there on the bed, but his head hid the view of his cock ever so slightly. I was patient for only a bit, then I decided "Well, since this is a dream, I can do whatever I want, and I want to raise my head and have more fun." So I raised my head and caught a full view of his soft penis, then I touched him and went down on him and he got hard, and responded to me and I got hard. I sucked him for awhile, pleasantly aware that he was small enough to suck without discomfort, but that I still had to beware the teeth in the side of my jaw so that I wouldn't scrape his delicate skin. Then I was delighted to observe that he enjoyed the same cock-teasing games that I did, so I stopped as he drew toward his climax, and went to the hand job, and we both got terrifically excited---so much so that I thought "Now's the time I can try screwing" and I recall him squatting on top of me, and I'm remaining hard as I penetrate him, and I can feel the upper part of my cock caught in his grasp and feel that this feels GOOD, and we're doing well together in bed. I wake to find myself erect on my stomach, pumping against the sheet, and I loosen my pajamas to investigate spitting into my hand to entertain the pumping motion which suddenly feels very good. By then I'm thoroughly awake, and I don't want to masturbate, so I draw my hand away and snuggle back into the covers to sleep. Then I'm playing chess with someone I assume is Larry Ball, but the chess pieces are huge animals made out of chocolate, dark chocolate for one side, light chocolate for the other, and the pieces are the same sort of animal, so it's difficult not only to tell which side the piece is on, but which piece it actually IS. The major pieces are set, and somehow I've got a row of pawns, represented by tapered slabs something like inch-long pieces of a chocolate bar, but of a strangely wooden quality, with things written on them. I remember thinking that the right castle, an elephant, was labeled "Mrs. Coster," and the pawn was labeled "Mrs. Coster's Pawn," which was convenient once I got the hang of it, but then I had "the pawns for the piece" and an additional line of "simple pawns," and when I saw I had three rows of men to Larry's two, I was again embarrassed and swept the second row away and started again. This scene faded as my partner, now not Larry but some sort of butler, left the table for something more interesting, which turned out to be a doorway with red curtains drawn across it. "The curtains are open a bit," he said excitedly, peeping through a slit into the bedroom, and I got the impression that Venus and Tannhauser were having sex in that bedroom, and the butler was one of the grotesques in the court of Venus. Then, in the dream or out of the dreams, I conceived of a parodic story in which Betelgeuse, the butler, masturbates himself (branle-toi) copiously in the doorway, and they, inside, see the fluid flow into the room, betraying his presence, and they rush out, their Beardsley-white bodies gleaming in the candlelight, slipping in the pools of semen to become covered with the creamy slime, and they berate him, dripping his tributes onto the carpeted floors, and beat him, coming again as they do, so that the room gets totally spotted with the sex-slime. Whether I woke again then, or not, I was then dreaming of standing on Riverside Drive, with cars and busses about, with my red-white-blue striped bathing trunks very low on my hips (as my pajamas actually were at that point), and I threw a red satin robe about me which the wind caught, outlining my form beneath, keeping sexy drapes of the material showing and hiding my body as I leaned against what was first a tree, then turned into a rearview mirror on a car. Out of nowhere, a bus stopped in front of me, with a narrow nose in which the female driver sat in a windowless enclosure and reached out to ask in my direction "Do you have a transfer?" I felt she was talking to someone behind me, and one of the two women in the convertible beside me (not the one on which I was leaning, which was parked) was waving a white wrinkled piece of paper about the size of a dollar bill. "Will you sell me your transfer?" asked the driver, and I was the intermediary as I handed the transfer to the driver (who obviously had run out and needed one for a passenger) and took two nickels and a dime from her and gave it to the driver. Then I retook my position, and I woke.
November 14, 1968
I was in some sort of concert hall filled with people, and I was sitting in the lower right-hand corner looking toward the stage, though I was so close to the stage that at times I was almost in the wings. There was some sort of dress rehearsal going on, and it was a ballet. I saw the Queen Mother sitting regally on her throne, the Prince standing beside her, and the ballerina resting at the foot of the throne. But then the ballerina got up and went over to the Prince, and everyone in the audience knew it was wrong, but she did it anyway. Then there was the time for the bows, and I was delighted to be sitting in the front, because the lights from below outlined the cock of the dancer in great detail, and it was rather like one of the limp, but large ones I'd seen last night in the pornographic films Eddie lent me, and the upward lights cast it into great relief: the huge hose of the cock stretched upward from the massy balls, and the outline of the underside of the head could be seen clearly pushing out the thin material of the tights. Again and again they bowed, and the woman behind me got angry with the scene, and said they should go on with it and get to something else. I turned around to her and said she should feel good that she was seeing so much of the performance at this time, since this was only a dress rehearsal. There was more grumbling, but the performance went on, I switching my vantage back and forth as if I were sometimes on the stage and sometimes not. There were other fragments of dream that same night, but I don't remember them, and am forcing myself to write THIS out.
November 21, 1968
It's hot, sunny summer, and we rent a house at the ocean: my grandmother, my mother, my sister and I. We're in the sun, active, laughing, and my mother calls us in for some reason, wanting us to get dressed up, and we don't understand, but go upstairs to obey her anyway. I put on fresh summer stuff, casual and comfortable, but have trouble combing my hair, which has been bleached straw-white by the sun. Then we meet in my mother's room, and she's there in an old-fashioned high-necked high-style dress, and my grandmother's in elegant black, and they berate us for not being dressed right for church. It's 5 of 11, and we leave to go to make it to 11 o'clock mass. We're willing to go, and are walking along a sandy road and my mother and grandmother are talking about some death in the news, and are saying that it's too much that "the children take black roses to the grave." Then my sister falls forward on the path and my mother and grandmother rush to help her, and my mother says "It's another white-out." My sister has this white face, but her eyes are bright and gleaming and there's eye makeup---an orange-brown shadow on the eyelid. She keeps saying "I can't hear you, just let me rest." Then my "brother," older than my sister by 2 years, he's 14 or 15) has that same beautiful bright-eyed abstractness, each eyelash clear and curled and distinct, face radiant, and I think "Maybe he's NOT too young to have a girl someplace." We ask "What IS it, what IS it?" and my brother grabs me with a strong enthusiasm and asks, "You want to see the man? You want to see the man?" I nod, breathless, eager, and we RUSH off across a field to a fringe of bushes, VERY quickly, and search, quickly, under the bushes. "He's gone, the flying saucer's gone." I look back at his beautiful face and begin to hold him close, choking him, in an agony of frustration, as his face is somehow a trick. I scream, enormously, yearning, "This happens"---I can feel my emotions rising higher---"EVERY," which is almost a SHOUT, as my body prickles and all senses start---and I wake, about to scream the "D" sound of "DREAM," but the dream colors are gone, and only the black typed word dream, repeated many, many times, some clearly, some fading, in columns, stands before my eyes, either real or in the dream, but I'm awake and it's over.
December 5, 1968
There's some sort of room in a house, with sun shining in through curtained windows, and Grandma (strange how she's shown up so often recently) is watching the baby in the room. There's some sort of agitation in the family among the five people in it: Grandma, Mom, someone else, and two children, the baby boy and the little girl. Grandma's now watching the baby boy, and she's holding him, but she drops him like the woman drops the baby in "The Mix-Up" with the royal twins, "The satin coverlet slides in her fingers, and the bundle slips to the floor with a whisper of satin." There's a thud, and it's known that the baby's dead. Then there's a scene in another, darker, room, and the four are gathered as if to say "We're sorry the baby's dead, but now we have an even better chance of becoming a happy family." There's some pleasantness for awhile, but then the little girl starts causing trouble with the someone else, the little girl disagreeing, saying "There is, there IS," and the other person is saying "No, NO, NO." The room gets darker and darker, the feelings get more intense, and there's the feeling that this is a TV soap opera, or that someone's watching the scene, and the family would rather not acknowledge its internecine quarrels, but there are even comic strip symbols of blows and curses, and as darkness closes over the room, there's a slam, a series of bumps and moans from all four, and there's the hideous knowledge that they've broken through the basement door and are tumbling down the stairs in the dark, and a deeper voice cries out in pain over the jumbled groans. The pain is palpable, and I'm absolutely horrified by what just happened, and my eyes, inwardly, swim, the vision being taken by what looks to be a rock covered completely with neat black hieroglyphics, and this rock, or gray surface filling the field of vision, begins to rotate, slowly, then more rapidly, and in the blurring center of gray bursts forth the intense red and blue of a tiny area of mympths, and I wake, horrified at disaster, with a warm feeling licking up the back of my arm, and I feel the room is on fire, but then I find my arm's only numb from lack of circulation, and I'm awake and almost trembling from the remembrance of the HORROR of the tumble in the dark.
DREAMS FROM 1969
February 7, 1969
First was a color-TV program telling about some runaway child, who fell into the river, and the view was of an orange-tan rippled surface, flowing between yellow-green banks of vegetation, and the camera panned further downstream, but there were no rocks or rapids, and I remember thinking "It couldn't lead to much of a falls, and where are they, anyway." As if acceding to my request, the camera continued to pan, and the left wall of greenery broke away to the view of the sky, and there was a shallow drop down to a step-series of falls leading to a yellow-tan field of boggy grasses, deeply indented with some sort of tracks. "Oh, I guess they've been searching for the body." Finis.
Then, after a period, I was in "my" apartment, a tiny cleared area under a low beamed roof, surrounded by a larger area of piled furniture in darkness. I was dusting, it seemed, and I got further and further back into the piled-up furniture, and I dusted more and more items of old battered furniture, and the areas got lighter, and it seemed less crowded, and I figured I could USE some of this stuff, and enlarge my living area, since it became apparent that I was living in only a small fraction of the space available to me. I dusted tables and chairs, and saw a large old chest of drawers on its back, with some small drawers paradoxically hanging up into the air. I'd thought they were larger drawers, but saw that the 4x5-foot chest was divided into six or seven rows of eight or nine drawers each, with a corrugated front, each with a little knob. The front was cracked, but I figured "I'll either use it or throw it out," and with mounting joy remembered that I got it from Grandma Zolnierzak, and that it was full of stuff she'd given me that I hadn't bothered to look at. "Oh, and there were stamps," I thought with elation and greed as I "remembered" her going through packets and manila envelopes of stamps, many mine, from strange places in Africa, which she pressed on me, unaware of their enormous value. They were old, but in new condition, I recalled, and bent toward the overflowing drawers to see my treasures, but that's all I remember, except the disappointment on waking about how STRONGLY I had "remembered" the stamps that Grandma had given me. How distracting these false memories can be---almost as distracting as Krishnamurti considers REAL memories---a THOUGHT!!
Feb. 24, 1969
It's sort of like a movie, but it's also like real life: there's a family who are in Europe, and someone asks where they live in the United States and there's a mumble. Someone, like my sister, asks "Where?" and they say it clearer: "17 Hudson St."
The scene shifts, and it's a New York street that I try to recognize, and I say to Rita, "See, it IS Hudson Street," but I don't really recognize it as such. The camera is panning across a lot in which there is the rubble of buildings having been torn down, and when it gets to the next building, with sections of stairway and walls and floors hanging half off the building, the address is 198 Hudson Street, and then the family appears on the scene, and I recognize the father as being the short fat villain with a wide grin of anger from the Beatle's "Help." He makes a scene in front of the wreckage of his house, and then there's a close-up of him and his wife staring at each other in amazement.
In a panic, he dashes up the stairs, with the sunlight filtering through the wrecked walls making it obvious that the building is a wreck. The wife moves into the kitchen on the ground floor, and makes motions upstairs about what her husband is doing. At first I have the feeling that the place is on fire---maybe that's what destroyed it, but the ruins didn't seem fire-blackened---because there's smoke and a crackling sound. Her motions somehow mean to me that he's upstairs jerking off, and I glance out through the ruined wall, and see that the crackling is really the falling of a liquid onto the wreckage outside, and I think maybe she's right, but I'm looking for a milky liquid, and this is clear, so I figure he must be urinating. The scene shifts upstairs and the camera pans in on his face with an embarrassed grin, and he's putting his clothes together.
Then it's time for bed, and the wife comes upstairs to find him curled in the dark in a little cubicle (in proportion to the "Cube" in Sunday's play on NBC Experiments), and she makes ready to lay down next to him in the darkness to sleep, and I wake up, thinking the whole thing nonsensical.
February 26, 1969
"MO-THER"
It seems that my eyes were instantly open, possibly even before the sound stopped. I heard the sound distinctly, the first syllable loud and clear, the second louder, with an intonation which was a cross between a call and an admonishment. Joan's mother and she were attuned, Joan liked to say, and I thought quickly over the possibilities: something had happened to her mother, and it was a call of panic, or a call to safety. Or her mother had come to her in a dream, telling her to do something differently, or saying she didn't like something, and it was the "Oh, MOTHER" of impatience and irrelevance. Or Joan herself felt she was in trouble, and she was calling to her mother for help, though there was no sound of panic in the voice.
The sensations that went through me happened faster than the alternatives crossed my mind. It seemed that my eyes were jolted by their sudden opening, and for instants there were flashes of light, like tiny ice crystals forming or melting on a glassy surface, and these moved in and out like stars expanding or shrinking. In each clear center of the plastic-like stars were, in each, astoundingly centered, a mympth. I marveled at the simultaneous occurrence of ANYTHING and mympths, and the fact that they were SYNCHRONIZED made the occurrence even more amazing.
Then my heart started pounding, and I felt my right arm doubled up against my body, by fist under my chin, and the frozen feeling of sleeping limbs swept over my arm, and more startlingly, it seemed that warm water bathed the upper part of my torso, between my neck and my waist, with my crashing heart as a center. But my heart was pounding somehow after a silence, as if it had stopped for three or four beats, while I was thinking, the ice-stars were forming or melting, and while I was conscious of my frozen arm. Then panic crossed my mind as the former stopped state of my heart became more important: what if my heart HAD stopped due to the shock, for that was what I was surely experiencing! And the thought terrorized me more, for my heart beat even faster.
I opened my mouth to breathe, hoping that the additional air would soothe and comfort my heart, and the feeling of warm water about my upper torso increased to a hot prickle, and I was astounded at the SENSUOUSNESS of my shock. The sensations in the arm started to subside as I moved it, and I moved my legs, feeling them for the first time since I woke.
Vaguely I recall listening to some other sound from the living room, where Joan was either awake or sleeping, but I couldn't tell from the lack of sounds which it was. I changed position laboriously on the bed, expecting her to ask if I was awake, but there was silence after my sheet-rustle.
My heart settled back to a more normal rhythm, and I began to be angry with her for startling me, and with myself for being startled too much. I had been a long time getting to sleep, what with Joan reading until about 1 am---and here she said she was sleepy!---and when I had gotten to sleep, here I was awake again. It might take me forever to get back to sleep again.
But the warm feeling crept out of my chest, I could breathe again normally through my nose, I resettled myself into the bed, and when next I moved my legs, I was relieved to feel that they felt like the rest of my body, that is, normal.
I sighed deeply, happy to be through with it, and wondered idly whether I should have asked Joan how she was. Nonsense! She might just as well have remained asleep through the dream---though I remember thinking that struggle takes place when you're calling someone in a dream, and you try harder and harder, and as you make a supreme effort, you call, and you're actually calling, and you're totally awake, feeling silly for having uttered a sound.
So Joan was probably feeling silly inside now, and after all, if she wanted something from me, it was for her to ASK it from me, not vice versa. In a surprisingly short period of time, I fell back to sleep, not even resorting to counting, as I had to put myself to sleep that evening originally.
March 18, 1969
I was in a living room of a house much like mine or Joan's in Ohio---with a tacky carpet, a sofa against one wall, a number of chairs scattered about, and an inoperable fireplace. With me there were four or five guys, like members of a fraternity, and though I was a member, or initiate, of this fraternity, I felt shy and unworthy to be among them, and thus didn't say much, but was conscious of an effort to be included among them. They were drinking and talking animatedly, smiling and walking back and forth, and I have the impression that they were all taller and better looking than I was, and I was sifting them back and forth, trying to decide which of them I was attracted to more than the others. Then I was sort of disappointed at the appearance of what I took to be a colored maid---I didn't want a woman around, but it turned out she was only a friend, and when she introduced herself, she had a strange name, like Carmen America, and I remarked about her name and she sank into a chair with an enigmatic smile, and the fellow-members laughed indulgently at my joke. One fellow was seated at the sofa with a sort of table carrying food in front of him, and I had to edge past the table to sit on just a little bit of the sofa next to him. He was talking about his experiences, and mentioned that he had had "Neo-Vordyn" which everyone but me seemed to know about, except that it was a drug of the LSD type, but much more powerful. He stood to tell his impressions, and he could only say, with an awed look on his face, that it was "truly mind bending." The others in the group seemed to be impressed, as if they knew exactly what the term meant due to their prior wide range of experience. I needed something to compare it with, and asked him to explain farther, but he ignored me---I remember his profile as he continued to talk to the others in the room---and just said in this quiet voice that it was "truly mind bending." There was sun in the room from outside, and I was very pleased to be there, so pleased that I wasn't even put out about not being a full-fledged member. I woke then, without coming to any sorts of conclusion about the matter, and it was only a half-hour after awakening that I remembered I'd had a dream at all.