March 9, 2001
I'm carried through the woods by two gas station attendants who
think I'm dead. Through the weave of the afghan I'm wrapped in, I
see stars. It's cold and I'm afraid my breath with show. One
man says, "Vera swallowed a nail." I'm somehow aware that this Vera
is a loose woman. They lay me down and begin digging. Unable
to move, I'm dropped in the hole at the bottom of which is a thin girl
who puts her face to mine and through the material whispers, "We'll be
back up in the sky."
March 5, 2001
It was my first day working in a library
and a tall man was showing me around the stacks. He would show me
where to get the returned books and then wipe his eyes with a balled up
tissue. Then he would show me how to hold the elevator door with
the cart and wipe his eyes again. It seems he could not stop crying.
Soon I was wheeling down the narrow maze of the old stacks replacing enormous
bound facsimiles of Joyce's Buffalo notebooks when I heard some women snorting.
In the corner, at a carrel, three ladies were watching a show on a portable
television. The show was a series of makeovers for people who had
been arrested and had to clean themselves up for court. When the
women saw me watching their TV, they grabbed me by the arms and held me
to the ground. One of them, a thick thing in curlers who had a match
in her teeth, told me that the library was on fire.
February 27, 2001
What was I going to do? I didn't
know what to do. Here I was in the fish's mouth. No, I wasn't.
I was in bed thinking hard about where I was in relation to the hotel room
I've been staying in. My dream began with a troop of Cossacks demanding
to see my privates. Apparently some betting had been going on.
I ran into the forest, disrupting the late-night grouse hunt of the local
drunk and lacerating my burnt face with brambles. The brambles became
Devil's Rope, i.e. two twisted strand wires with four point sheet metal
arrow plate barbs split and shaped like a shark's fin. It was then
I felt myself flying upwards or swimming now through the thinning sycamores
whose red leaves resembled hands on canes on canes (precarious!).
These leaves became floating chunks (of what ?) of fish and I found myself
swallowed by a white whale, a warm avalanche!
February 23, 2001
An electrical smell at the ballet sent
me behind the curtain in a panic I first noticed on the backs of my hands.
A girl with clear skin offered me a Xanax. You could follow the blue
vein down her breast. She cut the pill in half with a knife, covering
the operation with her left hand and asking me about some priceless red
books which were needed and missing. In these books were detailed
the contents of a girl's stomach found in the woods whose hair had been
licked off by an over-affectionate beast. Taking the pill with a
warm glass of wine, I went looking for the source of the electrical, burning
odor. I went down a long hallway but found that if I rushed, the
hallway merely narrowed to a point but if I proceeded slowly, it went on
forever. I believe this dream to be a metaphor for the Jibangus spegWeb
Summit I have recently returned from.
February 12, 2001
A man with a mustache painted on his lip
came out of a box that fell off a truck. I told my friend to hide
but the man heard me. He shot me and the hole in my stomach looked
like wet newspaper. I peeled away layer after layer and soon had
my whole hand in the hole but there was no end to the soggy mess.
Then my friend said, "What's wrong with the sun?" and sure enough, the
sun was blinking. I thought I was losing my mind so I covered my
eyes and screamed--Then I thought I had woken up but my room was surrounded
by ladders. I was in Manila, vacating the presidential palace.
February 8, 2001
I had no legs and was wheeling myself
down the street behind a decent-looking woman. She had a rather flattering
skirt on and I was staring with greater and greater attention at her hindquarters
trying to get the "old feeling". My concentration soon had me at
the cusp of fainting with the air coagulating in great arches around the
lady's active posterior. A couple of kids wearing their clothes backward
came charging by with a red-white-and-blue basketball, scattering my attention
like pigeons. I pulled a whistle out of one of the pockets in my
Army vest and blew. It tasted of blood, like an old fork. A
dancer came out of a nearby strip joint and, surrounded as she was by pulsating
red bulbs, I almost fell out of my chair. With my free hand I tucked
my cut-offs under my torso, also noticing in that instant my "old friend"
at attention, so to speak. The dancer was staring at me like a snake.
Her hair was blond and came over her shoulders in two long braids.
I set to stuffing my beard into my mouth and moaning. My heart stopped,
started again with a dribble, and began to pound. What I had only
barely noticed before as a soft siren had meanwhile grown into a crunching
roar, like wind in a microphone, and I was utterly overcome.
January 29, 2001
Today's diary entry is illustrated for
those uncultured. Just as I was about to eat a cannoli
, a grey-haired woman snatched the doily
it came on and ran off with it. Bemused, I bit into my tasty dessert
only to find it to be a shell for a tightly rolled scroll. Not wanting
to be a part of anything so shady, I disposed of the whole thing and went
to a nice park where someone offered me a free tai-chi lesson. When
I agreed, the little man snuck me a scroll and told me to be careful.
Needless to say, I dropped the scroll and walked off to play Frisbee with
a naked girl and her pit-bull. One thing led to another and soon
I was finding another scroll--decency prohibits my detailing where.
I tossed it, the scroll that is, but her dog kept fetching it and bringing
it back to me which was about the most annoying thing that I have ever
dreamed. It was then the aforementioned old lady who had stolen my
imitation-lace plate adornment brought a police officer and denounced me.
Despite the obvious senility of my accuser I was dragged to a police car.
The officer drove me a few blocks, letting me out of the car and handing
me a scroll with a wink. At this point I woke up, utterly sick of
myself.
January 26, 2001
I found a lip on the floor next to my
desk. When I touched it my finger turned red. Then I touched
it with another finger and it turned red too. Now I had two red fingers.
I spent the rest of the dream reading a book about the tidy liberation
of some simple village girls by a fellow with salami on his breath.
I recall in one part of the narrative this fellow tried to grow a little
beard under his mouth by sleeping with his face in a whore's lap.
While I sat reading, it rained short strands of ash that left specks on
my window. Apparently the everglades were on fire.
January 24, 2001
I was employed at a firm which researched
the transitive property as it relates to communicative halos. Handling
stacks and stacks of halos, looking like coffee filters, I fell into conversation
with a bearded man my coworkers referred to as Ripley because of his lonesome
habit of reading various editions of the Guinness Book of World Records.
Ripley informed me that the smallest jerkin ever worn by a law professor
was only one molecular layer thick and came from carving out a sausage
skin with an ancient Japanese sword. Suddenly, as is the character
of dream, I was crying at the feet of a samurai about my guilt. It
seems I did not remove one of my own teeth to swallow as a symbol of this
or that but instead swallowed a tic-tac.
January 22, 2001
I was brushing the ants out of some tabernacle
when it dawned on me I was a priest. Turning around I saw an empty
church and a smoking bell floating down the pews. I watched it zig-zag
its way back to the stained-glass window which pictured, I believe, several
soldiers trying to march while holding enormous spoons. On the altar
in front of me was a challis of wine I reached for only to have it become
a pen. I sat down on the carpet and began to write a story on my
handkerchief but the tip of the pen kept puncturing the cloth and I couldn't
decide if I should write about two people in bed listening to someone pee
or about a bus ride during which everyone asks to borrow everyone else's
clothes. To my horror, the doors of the church opened and well dressed
people started to file in so I hid under the altar knowing my humiliation
was imminent.
January 18, 2001
A short, feverish dream: I was walking
back to the dream lab from some Irish bar when some semi-bum tall dude
with a really really busted nose said "hey" to me and so I said "hey" and
then passed him. From behind me he repeats, "hey man" and I turned
around and he was walking right up to me going "I KNOW you" and he goes,
"What's your name, David?" and I go "Jif" and he goes, "Jeff?" and he shakes
my hand in a REALLY weird way and so I start walking off and he goes
"Don't forget me!" I didn't touch anything until I got back to the
lab and washed my hand with lots of soap. He looked like Eric Roberts.
That's two gay dreams in one week!
January 16, 2001
I apologize for not updating this diary
for so long. Among the dreams I have had was one on the night of
the 11th. I was 13 again, and over a friend from school's house
for the first time, where several of my classmates had assembled for a
session of Dungeons and Dragons. It seems my friend, Brian, had a
mentally
retarded younger brother who ran a bit wild and had only three fingers
on each hand. Brian's single-mother made us English muffin-pizzas
and the game slowly began. Before much had happened, Brian took me
aside and showed me his Apple II upon which ran an adventure game called
Sherwood Forest. Brian was a year older than myself and wore a back
brace for his scoliosis. He typed the word "blow" and the game responded
its generic, "I don't know how to blow" which inspired giggling.
Now Brian began to tug at my belt and an instinctual push sent him falling,
impaling him upon his back-brace. The smell of blood sent me running
back to the table where my other friends were all waiting, their heads
turned to look out a sliding-glass window which looked upon a screened-in
pool. In the pool, I saw Brian's mother waist-deep, holding Brian's
retarded brother under the water. I felt as though this were my fault
for deceiving my classmates as to the extent of my experience with Dungeons
and Dragons. I woke from this dream in a sweat, my sore throat the
first indication of the flu I have suffered from for five days since.
January 8, 2001
Went to a county fair this weekend and
decided to describe a dream to a Fortune Teller/Dream "Analyst" woman.
This old hag was a real moron--she didn't even know about the Internet--exactly
what "future" was she going to look into?? Anyway, this is the dream
I told her: I limped through an alley between two parking lots and
came upon a small park which consisted of a single hill littered with brown-paper-bagged
bottles reminiscent of girdled jaspers or Mandarin ducks. At the
top of the hill was a sculpture of a faucet. Here I stepped in something
soft. It was too cold to stop so I kept limping along, now noticing
that whichever way I turned I was followed by a little piece of fluff.
It followed me out on a wooden platform which went way out over a lake
and then stopped. I saw cattails and clouds of gnats rising like
fists and a cold alligator. I shone a flashlight into the alligator's
eyes and they blinked red so I knew it was a female. Remembering
the bit of fluff, I turned around and saw instead a bright light with little
strands coming out like whiskers from the edges. Turning back I noticed
that I had to turn my whole body--no longer just my neck. I was floating
on my stomach in the icy water. The old Fortune Teller at the fair
said my dream meant that I was unhappy with my coldness towards others
and feared the very isolation my intolerance ensured. What a charlatan!
January 3, 2001
Much too excited to sleep! I just
got my tickets to the first annual Spegweb Summit in Madison, Wisconsin
to be held in February. The idea of meeting the Jibangus co-creators
face-to-face is more than I can stand. Then, when I try to lie down,
all I can do is think about the future of the Internet. Some people
say the Internet IS the future but that doesn't make any sense. The
only dream I had last night was about a boy who looked so much like a chicken,
his friends called him "Chicken". He was jumping around in the snow
banks with another boy who kept insisting he worked for Mister Rogers.
January 1, 2001
This sounds rather poetic, I'm afraid.
What can I do? Sometimes dreams are arty. It so happens that
suns keep rising, one more beautiful than the next. One's dark blue
with lots of gold lights, one's red and dragging a fat pink ribbon. One's
covered
in mirrors. People wake up sneezing, next to their skins. They
can barely hold their aching heads. You have to sort of ball up.
At first it's hard to move. You have to lick the end of each breath
and stick it to the next. Soon everything passes for normal.
A nice rain falls. The drops hang in the air so we can look in them.
Little snakes roll around in each. Then the moon moves and the stars
scurry across the sky from behind it. I'm crunching along down some
street somewhere, watching the bats swoop down from the bell tower to mix
with the pigeons flapping about like who-knows-what in the square where
people sell the silverware of neighbors who disappeared or rub a certain
spot on the nearby bridge for luck, perhaps on the belly of a figure in
a relief commemorating an historical defenestration. It's cold and
my shoes are enormous. I write a few lines in my diary: "The
tree wears a hat. The church wears a hat." Wings stick up from
the road, blown flat then popping up again. A little anxiety
sticks me: that my heart has stopped moving, I think that was the
problem. I wake up at midnight to the screams of my neighbors, who
have just completed their yearly countdown. A woman staggering by
my window sees me sit up in bed and presses her face to the glass.
December 21, 2000
I had just turned in when I heard my window
open. I pretended to be asleep but when I heard someone crawling
in I leapt up and flicked on the light. An old man in his bedclothes
was kneeling on my desk, pulling a sack through the window behind
him. He was too hollow-chested and hairless to be Santa but
just shaky and wild-eyed enough to be a lunatic. I tried to be polite
and said, "Why have you come in my window, sir, and who are you?"
But he just waved me over and started digging in his shopping bag.
He said, "I dreamt of a very young woman who looked like she wanted
to eat me up!" The old man smelled of mentholyptus and onions and,
knocking my papers off the desk, pulled a pigeon from his sack: "And
look at this." He parted the feathers on the pigeon's breast and
on the skin I could see what looked like Hebrew letters. "What's
that?" I said. "You've got eyes haven't you?" he snapped. At
this point the pigeon flew around my room throwing the old man into such
a panic I woke feeling very depressed.
December 20, 2000
The world of dreams is often silly.
I've no illusions that this knocks the legs out from under my narrative.
Nonetheless, a prison got up on its hen legs and walked off, leaving all
the inmates blinking in the sunshine and running off in all directions.
One officer being a stickler, shot a slow, rather fat escapee as he was
climbing over some torn up plumbing. One of the guards said we should
eat the dead man but when he saw the surprise of the group, he claimed
it "Just slipped out." Just as ridiculous, a conversation between
a baby and an egg: the baby says, "You couldn't be more dull."
The egg replies, "That's what you say. But not a hen." The
baby says, "What do you mean, 'not again'?" The egg, "A HEN.
It's hard to speak through this shell." The baby, getting up, "Hens
are dull." The egg, "What's the use of talking? I wish I could
give you a good smack!" Then the baby sits down on the egg which
breaks and runs off in all directions. What a load of nonsense!
It occurs to me that the future will need such nonsense because of the
logical rigidity of its computational ubiquity. QED
December 19, 2000
A nurse was walking up the sidewalk when
a Chinese man, short and old but not unkempt, caught her attention.
As she neared him she noticed he was holding a quarter in one hand and
reaching toward her the other, wiggling his fingers. She kept walking
but as she passed looked into his face, realizing he had no upper lip,
only a large sore that reached from his gums. The nurse just then
passed a walled-off playground where disembodied shrieking sent the blood
rushing to her head and made her neck and shoulders itch under her uniform.
At this moment I was the nurse although the next moment I was again more
like a roving camera observing the action, watching her drop in a shop
for a slice of pizza. Next to her sat two remarkably good-looking
men. One said to the other, "Stop complaining and hold your nose."
And the other replied, "It stings my eyes." As the nurse ate
she thought about taking a different route back but forgot to when the
time came. Instead of the Chinese man, she came across a series of
brass hooks which hung from thin chains reaching up into the clouds.
December 18, 2000
I was an ice sculptor who heard angelic
music while I carved the big blocks into transparent fish. I focused
on the sound and was trying to decide if it was voice or instrument when
the song very clearly told me I was dreaming. Furthering my
worry that the extensive study of dreams (as I have undertaken in immersing
myself in the electric dream service) is beginning to effect my own dream-life,
this weekend I had a lucent dream in which I came across an old girlfriend.
Knowing that I was dreaming and being the future guardian of the world's
dreams, I felt it incumbent upon me to conduct an experiment. I told
this "girl" that she was not a person but a dream, my dream, and, above
her protests, explained to her that anything she had to say was coming
from me-- a very frustrating realization for her I can tell you!
Well, she begged me to relay a message (I didn't want to remind her that
the message was actually coming from my own unconscious, the poor dear
was crying so), a message I was to deliver, upon waking, to the old girlfriend
she "appeared as" or represented. Her message: "Tell her that they
will tell us exactly what to do." As the message really had
nothing to to with my old girlfriend I did not relay this message, in effect,
breaking a promise to myself only. My regret is that I didn't
inquire about to whom "They" referred, an oversight I can attribute to
the fact that being aware one is dreaming is still a far cry from being
awake. My understanding was that "us" in the message referred to
herself and what she now understood was her "real" self, i.e. my unconsciously
animated representation of an ex-girlfriend and the actual woman living
in Detroit that I haven't spoken with in several months. As
I write "several months" and think about this person I am amazed to recall
that she was a choral singer who could safely be described as "icy" if
not quite "frigid" which does cast a new light on the dream I began this
entry describing!!
December 15, 2000
I dreamt of a man whose girl took to going
to bars with a bear. Although no men could stand this bear's company
and even took to abstaining from honey, some ladies prone to flattery didn't
mind listening to a bear expound on this or that. You see, the bear
only liked his own company, or liked to think that was so, but had a weak
spot, or what he'd smugly call his weak spot, for young ladies. Well,
the man whose girlfriend seemed to be straying took consolation in the
fact that the bear was very fat and ugly. He had a face like a pot
of potato soup! And ticks! Anyway, I've better things to do
than worry about this girl, especially if her boyfriend's unconcerned.
They can all wear berets and divine the future by flipping through Finnigans
Wake for all I care! I just don't like the idea of this bear.
If I start dreaming about him again I'm going to try to wake myself up.
This is a dream with a moral: if you don't like something, stay the hell
away from it. It's like this boy named Donny whom everyone called
Mark because Donny had a real keen sense of smell and so did this guy Mark
who's dead and not really important to our story anyway. Well, Donny,
or Mark as we'll call him, used to keep away from his grandmother because
he didn't like the way she smelled. Mark didn't like the way women,
in general, smelled and if you add to that his grandmother's girth and
age plus the fact that she was a little senile or defeated or both and
therefore not very clean, you've got a real stinker. So, one day
Mark's granny went to see her grandson because she was going to die soon
and wanted to say goodbye. Now, in the last few years Mark had made
quite a name for himself in the truffle business. He put many a pig
out of business! So when Granny found his house it was so big and
beautiful that the poor old thing had what we'll call a "little accident".
She got up the courage to knock on the door but the smell had already slipped
under the door, gone up the stairs, down the hall, and into Mark's nose
which promptly fell off his head and led to his complete ruin.
December 14, 2000
Had insomnia last night. Must speak
with Sir Roland Tremmens. Kept hearing Mom in room above saying,
"We knew something was wrong with Elsie when this morning she couldn't
move her head." Father saying, "I saw my first dildo lying in the
street." Strange because I don't live with my parents.
December 13, 2000
This is disappointing but I wanted to
write about what happened after I sat down to a nice dream of ham stew
with chunks of carrots and torn cabbage in it and peasant bread for dunking.
But I've completely forgotten! I do recall a middle-aged woman for
this or that reason rubbing butter in her hair and then drinking herself
to sleep. I think I was the TV program going on and on while she
made loud and varied snoring and whistling noises. My hand shakes
as I write that ants woke her. She enlisted the help of a barber
who suggested she remove her blouse. "Why should I remove my blouse?"
she asked, beginning to cry. The barber's mother, a withered up thing,
sat on the hair-covered floor pressing the ants one by one as they neared.
When the barber wrestled his customer to the ground, a little mole poked
out from his collar which his mother took for an ant. She reached
out with the nails of her thumb and forefinger like clippers or a beak
and pinched it off. The barber screamed and the woman with butter
in her hair ran off to live her life. When the old woman looked at
the bit of flesh in her fingers she saw a tiny cock and balls.
December 12, 2000
I found another door in my house--should
I open it? It's MY house, after all. Who am I kidding, I went
in. You can't judge yourself for how you behave in a dream, even
if you don't know it's a dream. In a dream we don't know how we've
arrived at the moment so how can we be expected to rise above ourselves-in-the-moment?
Anyway, there was a very narrow room that had a chair at the end.
It was so narrow that both walls were scratched up when somebody forced
a chair in there. The strangest thing was, there was a girl sitting
in the chair reading a book. She was very trim and I'm not a bit
embarrassed to relay, naked. I said, "What are you doing in my house?"
and she said, "I'm your landlady." This was ridiculous so I said,
"No you're not!" She looked me up and down and gave me a nice smile.
She said, "If I'm not your landlady then why am I sitting here in your
house?" I had to admit I didn't know.
December 11, 2000
A waitress presses a handkerchief in a
thick book and lets something drip from it into a cup of coffee which she
gives to a blind man whose head resembles a sausage. The waitress
watches him drink from between her own legs. She has bent over to
rub a cramp in her calf. At some point this waitress is fired, having
been caught shaving bits of horn into the soup of the day. The man
with the sausage-like head has also eaten this soup because now a thick
yellow fingernail is growing out of his head where once there was a normal
if sausagey bald spot. He goes to buy a hat. When he gets outside,
he notices that it has become very hot and finds his seeing-eye dog unwilling
to leave the fountain. People are dropping their winter coats and
stripping down, using their shirts to wipe their faces which are streaming
with sweat. The next day, it's twice as hot and old people and animals
begin to die. Everybody else just stares at the sun and then stares
at each other and then stares at the sun again. No one can sleep
that night but the next day wasn't that hot at all and the people all went
to bed early. The next day, however, it was so hot the clocks were
wavy and tires melted to the road so no one could go to work. All
the people went in the ocean, including the blind man with the sausage-looking
head and the waitress and even the guy who fired the waitress whose name
was Phil, and one by one they got sucked out to sea. All the people
washed up on a strange shore. In this town, bluesmen played on every
corner. You'd wait for a light to change listening to one and then
see another one across the intersection. They were all singing a
sad song about a cat that had a hole in its stomach because some bad kid
had fed it a piece of fish with a sharp bone in it and now the cat kept
eating the same bird and something else about how this bird was supposed
to deliver a song to a girl who was standing on a cliff somewhere trying
to decide whether or not to do herself in. Besides the bluesmen,
the town was weird because there were bees everywhere and if you stopped
walking they'd attack. All the houses were locked up tight but if
you put your ear to the door you could hear someone clapping. All
the people who had washed up on shore roamed around for a few days and
then went back into the ocean, unable to figure out anything and sick of
being stung by bees. Only the waitress stayed because her leg hurt
and she was afraid of drowning. She went right up to a house and
climbed in a window. The house was full of old women in waitress
outfits watching a fly spin around in a drop of water as if it was the
greatest of entertainments.
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