Annandale Dream Gazette

2012-02-09T18:36:00.003-05:00

I have been renovating my house for two weeks. I had a dream last night that I was driving to Mexico with a poet. I don't want to name names - but the poet is a little older than me & a long-time friend of my family's. Anyway, we were going to a poetry conference in Mexico. I had stopped at the Home Depot. I was buying towels. These were very special towels - the one I really loved was like a baby towel - it was lime green and had a duck on it. It was furry. But there were many other towels too. I was worried about money -but all the towels were $3.20. (Background information - I am painting the house green and have been in the hardware store for a total of 6 hours the past three days). But here's the good part - I awoke & I was having an orgasm! The dream wasn't remotely sexual. I'm certainly not in love with the poet waiting in the car to drive me to Mexico. But, there you have it.

2012-02-08T18:34:00.000-05:00

In my dream I was a younger version of myself, back in my mid to late twenties. I had been accepted to start my studies at the University of Melbourne and one of my sisters/daughters was about to get married. The place where I lived, my family home - though there were no parents there. It was as if I were in charge of the household as I am in real life today – was in utter chaos, stuff everywhere. In between trying to tidy up in readiness for the wedding which was to be held at home, I was preparing to move out, packing my clothes.

I was also working and awaiting the arrival of a first patient who never materialised. I could not reach the front door to check for him. The hallway was being renovated and there were ladders stacked in the way. Before the wedding I found myself at the Flinders Street clocks ready to move across the lights and head off in the direction of my new home. I had planned to rent rooms in the middle of the city up near Carlton, near the university.

My sister had negotiated the rooms for me on the phone. As yet we had not seen them. I came without my luggage wanting to check in as it were. On the walk along Swanston Street at the next set of lights a young tradesman who had been working on a nearby building started to flirt with me. He had a delightful Irish accent, the sort that I find seductive but I was determined to ignore him. He called over to his friends and began to behave as though he and I were in a relationship. I ignored him but did not send him packing.

We went inside a building and together watched a man selling fish. The fishmonger was actually inside a gigantic fish tank with the fish which had already been filleted and cleaned. It was as if he were swimming among great swathes of squid and the flesh of giant sea fish, barramundi, marlin and the like. He held fast to a sharp knife and sliced layers from the fish, cutting off thin slices whenever a customer made a request.

I asked for some fish but the bag in which the fishmonger put it dripped water onto the floor. I asked my Irish friend to help and another man came by. He carried special beads of some material that absorbed moisture and sealed off holes. He applied this to the leak in my bag and it was sealed immediately.

The Irish fellow followed me when I reached the corridor from which my newly rented room led. I realised with a start that I had forgotten the key but the landlady came by and offered to open the room for me with her spare. We walked through the door together, all three of us, me, the landlady who was young, the daughter of the owners perhaps, and my new Irish friend.

I looked across into what seemed like a broom closet of a room with a narrow bed in one corner and a short divan type arrangement against the opposite wall. I thought immediately this is far too small and then I looked up and saw that the ceiling was as high as four floors and in between on each floor several other such room arrangements, some of which included whole families, were suspended. I could see a cot and a mother nursing her baby about three floors up.
‘I can’t live here,’ I wanted to say but I did not want to upset my landlady.

We sat on the edge of the bed, my Irishman and me, and I began to cry. He comforted me and talked of the possibilities of the place. At least there was a window that looked onto a wide stretch of lawn. Lawn in the middle of the city, how could that be? And then I realised that to rent a place in the city would necessarily involve compromise. There were no big places available for minimal rents. I would have to make do.

*

I dreamed I picked lice eggs from a young girl’s hair. The eggs were dead. They had been treated with a pesticide which the chemist prescribes to kill lice, but the eggs clung to each shaft of hair as if their lives depended on it.

I found them near her scalp, white and shrunken, empty now of life. I took each egg between the nail of my thumb and forefinger and peeled it down the shaft. I pinched my finger nails together as if I were crushing a flea. The girl sat obligingly beneath my scrutiny. I rifled through her hair in search of more eggs and all the time I feared I might find live lice, lice that had somehow avoided the poison, lice that could continue to escape and jump onto other heads and infect them there with more eggs and hatchings.

*

Dream 30 december 2012.

My husband and I walked into our kitchen after an outing and found a woman standing there at the table. It was clear she had just made a telephone call. The receiver was in her hands.

‘Who are you? I asked and what are you doing here? I walked over and tried to stop her call by pressing the end-call button.
‘Too late,’ she said. ‘The others are already on their way.’
'I’m calling the police,' I said to my husband, but he seemed non-perplexed. I did not want to ring 000. This was not an emergency, at least not yet, but I could not remember the number for the local police station. I ran out onto the street and asked passers by if they knew the number. No luck.

I went over to my neighbour’s and in the distance saw a small group of men. They were making their way to our house and they were each carrying heavy loads. One couple shared the weight of a long machine, an earth working machine by the look of it.

I knew then that they had come for the purpose of working on our house in some way, but we had not invited them to come. What was this all about? My neighbour knew nothing of the police number and she too like my husband seemed non-perplexed at the thought of these men invading her space.

I noticed two or three men in my neighbour's back garden now. They were about to lop off branches from two rose bushes. The bushes had already been pruned, and stood skeletal against the sky line.
‘Don’t you dare touch those roses unless you know what to do. They've already been pruned.’
The men held off and walked over to other plants further down the garden.

My neighbour’s husband stood in the front garden. I told him I wanted to call the police and asked him if he knew the number.
‘I wouldn’t give it to you even if I had it,' he said. 'These blokes are doing a good enough job.’
‘But we never asked them to,’ I said. ‘And what will they charge? They’re duplicating work that’s already done.’
‘Don’t worry so much,’ my neighbour said and I walked off even angrier than before.

In my front garden I saw three men working on a stretch of green lawn. They had laid out sheets of plastic over the surface of the grass and were working on it in small patches across the stretch of lawn.
‘What in hell’s name do you think you’re doing,’ I asked. They looked intimidated but did not stop and I woke up.

*

2011-12-27T23:23:00.000-05:00

This morning in my dream I travelled in a car with my husband from the school where our daughters attended a holiday camp of sorts. We were sitting in the middle of the car, a stretch station wagon, and behind us sat two rows of school girls, five in the first row and three in the back. Along with the driver, a teacher, we made up nine in all.

The trip home seemed precarious. I held onto a thin strand of something, a piece of string with a knob, that seemed to be the only thing connecting the front of the car and the driver to the rest of us in the back. If I had let go I imagined the body of the car and all eight passengers, including me and my husband, would be left stranded, unable to move, while the driver took off in the front of the car. Split down the middle.

In spite of it all we made it back to the school. We had left our groceries in the car and my husband went off to have a rest while I stayed near to one of the other holiday cottages with my youngest daughter. We sorted beads and bits of jewellery.

At one stage I went inside the house of a writing friend and had to climb over a couch and bench top to get to the door as I was leaving. In doing so I upended a bowl of chrysanthemums.

The man who shared the house with my friend helped me to pick up the flowers and return them to the vase. 'What do they mean for you,' he asked in a Dutch accent.

‘Of family,’ I said. It was the first word that had come to mind. Chrysanthemums reminded me of my family. All those long stems and colourful heads.

2011-12-19T06:00:00.008-05:00

I dreamt it was very late at night, though weirdly light outside. We lived in a rambling apartment very high up in a building. My friends Jon and Mark were over. Mark was acting badly. Even though it was very late, Jon and I planned to go out. He was supposedly quitting cigarettes, and there was no way he was going to bed anytime soon. Mark walked over and lay down on the bed next to my wife Louisa. I said, “Aren’t you going, Mark?” He reviled me. I went to the kitchen to do some dishes. Mark followed and stood by me at the sink flicking water at me. “You’re just trying to provoke me to hit you, so you can hit me,” I said, then launched into a long complaint to this effect, “Mark, how can you act like this to me, after the thousands of things I’ve done for you? You shouldn’t be messing up my house, you should be helping me clean it.” He scoffed. “I’d help you clean your house,” I said, a bit of a stretch. He shrugged and finally left. Jon had already left.

I drove through some downtown city streets looking for Jon’s place. Was it that way? No, my friend Sandy’s place was over there. Jon’s place was in another direction. I started to turn around in the street, which was partly blocked off by construction. A couple of guys were standing there, leaning against a concrete divider. They came to jack the car as I was making a K turn in the confined space. A guy pushed his hand in the partly open window. I tried the power windows, the power lock, nothing worked. The car went dead, the guys got in. “Please don’t hurt me,” I said. I couldn’t read their eyes. “We’re just going to ride around and take some money out of your bank. It’s hardly a crime. It only gets you 40 hours in jail,” one of the guys said. With visions of $1,000 or more being taken out, I lunged to get out of the car. The guy grabbed me and almost did violence to me right then. I resolved to cooperate with them after that. They started leading me through some streets. It was almost fun. “Who’s the guy?” someone asked them about me. “Some tourist.” “I’m not a tourist, I live in Brooklyn,” I chimed. “Sure.” My daughter Charlotte joined up with me. I thought it would be OK for her to observe the criminal activity. They led me into what looked like an office building with, I figured, a Chase on the ground floor. I’d told them to take me to Chase, so I wouldn’t have to pay the fees. They were slightly amused. But we swung into a large room with many seedy people that reminded me of a nightclub. My abductors disappeared through a door. When I followed them, I didn’t see them anywhere, only lots of seedy corridors. I went back to the large room, where I noticed a guy with a ponytail. Was he one of them? I asked how to find them. A guy at a lectern pointed in a certain direction. Realizing I might get beat up for falling behind, I told Charlotte, “Things might get ugly, you better go back.”

I wandered into a legal office. God, I thought, I’m walking right into Kafka’s The Trial, a parallel world of enmeshment in a legal or bureaucratic nightmare that lurks in every society. It can happen anywhere at any time. But the lady at the desk was nice. I told her I’d gotten separated from a group. On her computer, she called up these maps of the vast complex, some 3-D and cross-sectional. She circled one area, off to the side. She called up a page with the names of my abductors listed. I recognized their address, which was near Jon’s. “What are you doing with these guys?” the woman asked. “Basically, they’re going to rob me,” I said. “I figured,” she said. “My daughter was with me,” I said, “but I told her to go back. She goes to Stuyvesant High.” The woman was uninterested. A guy who looked like Kevin Gilroy, a grade-school friend, came to retrieve me. He was holding a metal rod. He immediately threatened me with it, but didn’t strike me. We walked outside, along the side of the complex, as if we were going to enter another building. He said he was going to a Big 10 basketball game this weekend, mentioned how great this guy was on one Big Ten team. I mentioned Archie Griffin. “He’s only scoring five a game. But they need him to keep Knight honest. Knight’s still a bit rough.” As we talked basketball, I unfortunately awakened from this amazing dream.

I dreamt I visited the apartment of Allen Ginsberg after his death. I think I planned to steal some things, but there wasn’t much to steal, or if there was anything, it wasn’t apparent. There were just cheap cups, pictures and clothes. It turned out his place was connected to a caretaker’s apartment, which was down some inconspicuous back stairs. A woman caretaker appeared and asked me what I was doing there. I lied and told her I was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. I said I had left some papers and other things there. I wanted to pick them up now. Surprisingly, she believed me. She left and shortly afterward came back, saying there were some special Indian bowls on the outside windowsill I might be interested in. The bowls were incredibly cheap-looking.

2011-12-18T09:32:00.000-05:00

In my dream I came upon a woman who sat alone in the burned out remains of her house. Parts of the house were still intact: an outdoor garage filled with stuff and one side of the front room, which included the large armchair in which she sat, the chimney place and part of a mantel piece, but that was all. The rest of the house stood as charred remains.

The doctor who was also my doctor, a tall young man, walked into what was once the woman’s lounge room and muttered words of sympathy. She fell into his arms and sobbed.
‘How did this happen?’ he asked.
The woman was not certain she said but thought it had something to do with the fibres that were woven into a mat that lay on the floor covered in soot and burned debris. The woman pulled out a fibre and it morphed into a fuller shape as if it took on a life of its own.

Before she could explain any further I began to recognise that the fibres were probably related to ghosts or strands of similar fibres on the other side of the world.

The area became a bustling child care centre. I was inside one of the rooms when I came across J, one of my greatest adversaries in relation to a certain professional matter. We had not spoken for months. ‘Let’s agree to disagree,' I said to her. 'Let’s have a truce.’

She hesitated but in the end nodded her agreement and then handed over a large box of Lego that had once belonged to one of her sons. Some of the Lego tipped out when I tried to put it down and I saw that these pieces were all so tiny they would be a problem for my children and grandchildren to use, but I accepted the gesture as genuine.

I asked J’s son if he enjoyed playing with this Lego.
‘It’s not much fun, ‘ he said. It’s more like hard work.’’

All at once the husband of the woman in the burned out house leapt forward and threw a grenade at his wife and at a cluster of small children who were hovering in a sort of cubby house in front of the property. The woman and children panicked. They doubled over waiting for the explosion, but the grenade did not go off.

I was aware it could still explode but calmly started to urge the children one by one to leave their dangerous bunker and to go back to another house for tea. I urged the woman to do likewise when she was the only one remaining but she stayed put and my clock alarm, not the grenade, went off to end the dream.

*

Unbeknown to me and while I was out a Minotaur took up residence in my house. After I realised this, I decided to go in through the back entrance where I met a young school girl. She had been living in this part of the house and told me she had plans to kill the Minotaur.

‘I will wait till it’s asleep and then pierce its eye with my spear.’

I walked up the corridor to the centre of the house when the Minotaur appeared. It looked like a stocky, middle aged, short haired woman with an enraged glare in her eyes. It lunged for me as soon as she it me but I held it at bay using the pile of text books in my arms as a barrier. From around the corner a woman appeared pushing a trolley. She seemed to be a housekeeper or some other such servant and she looked on bemused.

‘What’s that behind you?’ I asked the Minotaur who turned and then launched the attack on the unsuspecting housekeeper. The Minotaur threw the woman to the ground and left her unconscious.
Then it turned back on me. Its arms, brown and sinewy, reached over the barricade of my books as it tried to grab hold of me. The Minotaur was determined to get me.
I woke in a lather.

*

I was desperate to find a place where I might write unimpeded when I found myself in the quadrangle of the University of Melbourne. I decided to go upstairs into an area that was usually off limits for those who did not have an ID.

I had lost mine but the woman at the front desk let me in regardless. She allowed me entry as far as the library but behind her back I snuck upstairs into a series of rooms where at last I thought I might be able to settle into writing.

I met my husband and his three brothers in this same series of rooms. They had been drinking, but were not yet drunk. My husband refused to take another drink one of his brothers had offered him and I was relieved. Otherwise, I thought I might need to carry him out.

We came across a room filled with people who looked as if they were asleep or unconscious. They did not stir when my husband and his brothers walked through and although their bodies were intact it was as if they were dead.

My husband and his brothers started to jostle these bodies, to wake them up.

The lifeless people began to stir but something in their movement alarmed me. They moved as if in slow motion and it was only when I looked into their eyes which were blank – there was no iris only white in the middle where the dark orb should be – I realised they were zombies.

I was terrified. If they should get hold of us, of any of us, I thought, they would grip on and turn each of us, the living ones into zombies.

I woke in a panic.

2011-11-30T06:00:00.000-05:00

I dreamed last night that he was dying. His body half its original size shrunken under the sheets like a dried out Patagonian mummy. His eyes were yellow. Liver disease, the doctors said. Too much alcohol. Cancer of the jaw. He could not speak. He did not try. The tremble that took over was like a death rattle. He did not have much time left and we, the survivors, sat around his bed. Each of us locked in our own minds. This death thing. It is happening to him, not to me. And when his brother climbed onto the bed beside him and tried to hold him close one last time, I saw the wet line of urine seep down his trouser legs and I knew that the brother too had lost control. The brother could not cry but his body leaked out tears. We, the bystanders, reeled back. We could not bear to see.

2011-11-29T06:00:00.002-05:00

Imagine as a writing exercise trying to describe something knowing that yr description will not describe what you want it to. Trying to describe an LSD trip, eg. Trying to describe a rm that one's in w/o resorting to any nouns, similies, metaphors, analogies; a bedrm described w/o using the words "bed" or "walls" or "floor" or "sheets" - attempting to describe the sheets topographically only.. - that sort of thing. That's the dilemma of trying to describe dreams. Extending that, that's the dilemma of describing ANYTHING - something will ALWAYS BE MISSING - something that makes the description crucially incomplete. I'm hyper-conscious of that in relation to today's attempt at a dream description.

There's an environment. I am in it. It's both architecturally-interior-like & enormously-outside-natural. I am on a flat surface. It's like a floor, it's like flat ground; it's not like a floor, it's not ground. To my left, wch, of course, is an inadequate relative description, is a steep cliff, rounded. The surface I'm on is water. The surface I'm on may not have initially been water. Perhaps something I have done, something I am doing, is making it fluid.

At '1st' this surface, this water, is bounded - on the left is the steep cliff; straight ahead is, perhaps a slightly higher flattish area wch isn't fluid. Around the corner of the cliff is another area where the fluid is bounded. Behind me there's some sort of human-created area bounding the fluid. It's as if the scale changes there to be the scale a small child sees when it looks up at table legs & table top whilst crawling on the floor. There are human created objects there, not necessarily describable as any particular thing - concrete abstracts of sorts. People live there or are visiting. Looking behind me, as I head forward, to the right of the people area the fluid continues on for a distance obscured from view - there's no immediate bounding of the water in sight.

I have a purpose. I am somehow going to make a dramatic change to 'reality'. I have a reason for this, this 'reason' serves a purpose I somehow perceive as benevolent. This does not describe it at all. The surface I am on may be solid enuf for me to walk on, it may be water, I may be in a small fragile boat, a raft. Whatever I am in or on, it remains undefined at the same time that it's clearly physical & I am clearly physical in my interaction w/ it - even though I seem to exist more as a POV (Point of View) than as a body that I can see.

Where the 'water' meets the 'shore' the water is fluid, there's a brown scum that extends out from the shore for maybe a ft or so. The water is perhaps thousands of ft deep. My chosen task is to descend, perhaps down a rope, to the bottom of this for some purpose that will make dramatic changes. I will not drown. I need to breath but I will not drown descending into this water w/o special breathing apparatus other than my not necessarily visible ordinary human body. When I reach the bottom something major is going to change. I don't want to descend in the water where the scum is, where I can't see b/c of the scum; I want to descend past the scum but perhaps the water isn't so watery past the scum, perhaps it's hard, perhaps it's ice.

I have to have a rope connected to the shore that became visible around the curve of the cliff that I'm at the bottom of. The water is still, there are no waves. I have to somehow fetch an object from this shore to be suspended on the rope. This object may be something like a plastic sculpture of an owl, it may be something completely different, it may be undefined, totally ambiguous - except that it's no bigger than 11 inches in length & ruggedly textured. It may represent something else, it probably does.

The rope is parallel to the surface wch may be water. The object is attached to it. I no longer need to descend to the bottom. I'm no longer holding the rope, perhaps the rope & the object are no longer there. I'm moving away from where I'd gone to - back toward where I'd apparently come from in the 'beginning' - even though there wasn't necessarily a 'beginning' b/c in the 'beginning' of this memory I was in the 'middle' of the space I've been 'describing' & I was coming 'from' the 'middle'. I was going back to the part of the water/ice where the boundary was no longer visible.

I cd walk on the surface that wasn't exactly ice - but b/c of what I'd done the surface that was closer to ice than anything else I can think of was becoming something that I cd no longer walk on b/c it was becoming water & it was very deep & I wd drown. I was heading away from where it was turning into deep water, walking backwards, perhaps - looking where I had been. In the little area bounded by the 'shore' & the curve of the cliff the surface cd no longer be walked on - it was deep water.

To my right, as I was moving backwards, there were people in the area w/ the human constructions. They were laughing in resistance to the change I'd initiated. They were preventing the surface from turning into deep water. It was as if there were only an ice-like surface w/ no potential even for deep water underneath it. But that was changing - not b/c their efforts weren't effective. In 'fact' they didn't have to make any effort - their existence kept things that way - it was their world, they defined it. But even tho they didn't need to do anything to keep the surface from becoming fluid, it was becoming fluid anyway.

There was a newscast, perhaps I heard it. Hundreds or thousands or an unnumbered quantity of sharks + some bears (not polar bears - black or brown bears, grizzly bears perhaps) + some walruses or walrus-like creatures coming onto the land from the deep water that was coming into being. The news may've announced that these creatures were eating humans - but I don't think I saw that happen. What I saw was the sharks & bears & walruses covering the land near the water's edge. I was retreating from them toward a small rock protrusion from the 'water''s surface at the edge of wch my girlfriend was laying half-asleep.

I reached where she was. The surface had melted to the point where she & the bedcovers over her were partially wet from the melting. I warned her that she had to leave this small rock area b/c the sharks wd be coming onto it & maybe eating her. She was more nonchalant about it than I was - saying that she'd been camouflaging herself w/ fake shark fins - wch I cd imagine seeing there but didn't actually see. I didn't think these semi-imaginary shark fins wd work to keep the sharks from recognizing her as human.

2011-11-28T06:00:00.002-05:00

I dreamed that I drove to the A.A. meeting in my real car, a silver-gray Infiniti FX35. I brought prescriptions from the pharmacy in their original wrappers with the instructions tucked inside. The pharmacy had given me a free prescription as a promotion—something for the vagina, though I’d had no complaint. It was Tuesday night at St. Luke’s, the church where I was baptized. I always say that about St. Luke’s—“the church where I was baptized”—as if I owned the place. Leo Kottke was there, and, for a change, it didn’t make me nervous. I just slipped through the door. There was no meeting in session, but people from the meeting and other people, too, were gathered. It was the Christmas holiday season. I had not seen Mr. Kottke for something like twelve years. I had bags, and he had bags. Besides the bags from the pharmacy, I had my work in satchels. Leo Kottke had his work in satchels, too. I fished in one of my satchels for a copy of Country Without a Name to show him. I thought it was appropriate to start there, with work we had done since we had last seen each other, and he thought it was appropriate, too, and began fishing in his satchels for work to show me. Country Without a Name and Solzhenitsyn Jukebox are ebooks, however, and no true print copy of them exists; instead, I had booklets made from them on my printer. I couldn’t find the best version with the illustrations by Daniel Harris, and instead found a prototype with a drawing of Leo Kottke on the cover. It looked like a doodle I had made of him, as if in my daydreams I had him in mind for my writing. It embarrassed me that I couldn’t find the real and finished version. I explained that it was an ebook, and he said he’d seen it because he had downloaded it from the internet. Then he took my hair and neck in his fingers, and he kissed me. He kept on kissing me. It was pleasing and exactly as I’d imagined it would have been had we started kissing in real life back when it now seemed we must both have known we had wanted to. I wanted to ask him, but knew it was better not to, why he hadn’t written to me long ago. If it was so easy to kiss each other now, why hadn’t he written to me in response to my letters (sent to his publicist) and kissed me then? I didn’t ask because the passion of the kissing, also the ease of it, the simple familiarity, brought us into present tense. I became cooperative with my heart and his. He had a plan, he said. “Let’s move all our belongings into the hallway and begin to transfer them to our cars.” He had so many things with him, not, it seemed, because he was homeless, but because he was camping or on the road performing. Susan Tepper was there helping with Christmas preparations. It was easy, as in real life, to get along with her. Leo went down the hallway. I assumed he was moving some of his things. I began organizing my things and thought of the complimentary prescription for vaginal healing. When he did not return for a while, I went to look for him. He had gone into the church where a Christmas concert was in session. He sat in a school desk near the top of the sanctuary. He looked a little drunk. He asked for another drink. He was drinking an almond-colored foamy concoction. I looked at him as if sorry, and he said, “Don’t feel sorry for me.” Drinks were being served on the grand piano. Sam Chauncey was one of the men serving the drinks. I said, ‘Sam,” and he said, “Ann, ask your question.” I said, “What is in this drink? Is it alcohol?” And Sam said that the almond-colored drink had a low alcohol content, and the cranberry drink did not. Someone said, “Maybe Leo is not used to drinking any alcohol, and the low alcohol content went directly to his brain.” I returned to where he sat in the school desk carrying an almond-colored drink. I served it to him. Our plan had shifted, but we didn’t mention it. He seemed to be in his own mind and amused by it.

2011-11-27T14:50:00.000-05:00

I had a dream that was set in an old town over a century ago, the sort of town you might see at Sovereign Hill in the Ballarat goldfields.
I watched a group of women out walking with their children. One mother went inside a store to fossick for material and while she was inside, a young boy, presumably her son, carried her baby in his arms.

To hold onto the baby the boy gripped tightly, too tightly it seemed.
‘Let go,’ one of the other children said to him as she began to wrestle the baby from his arms. But the boy held rigid. His arms circled the baby’s torso like a python .
The girl tried even harder to pull the boy’s arms apart, as did other children who joined in, but still he would not let go.

The baby who had been whimpering became floppy. Its head lolled to one side.
I knew then it was too late and the baby was dead.

2011-11-08T19:50:00.002-05:00

In my dream last night I was trying to find a place where I might wash my hair. My usual bathroom was unavailable because of tradesmen and therefore I needed to find another. I had already soaped up my hair with shampoo in readiness and stood talking in my dressing gown to my husband when two friends came by. Two friends I have known for a long time and feel mixed towards. They told us that their daughter had just died after an asthma attack. ‘She couldn’t keep up the fight,' they said.

They were devastated and their news devastated me, too. Throughout the rest of my dream wherever I went I found myself bursting into uncontrollable fits of weeping for this young woman, who happened to be the same age as one of my daughters. They were good friends. I told the mother that I worried about telling my daughter - who is very sensitive and would also deeply distressed - about her friend's death.

Somehow I managed to get a key to a hotel room where, without paying anything, I could have a shower and finish washing my hair.

I needed to cross Flinders Street but the lights were red. I waited in a crowd outside Young and Jackson’s, conscious that I stood only in my night gown in this most public of meeting places, under the clocks at Flinders Street station. Finally the lights changed and I tried to behave as though there was nothing unusual about a woman in her nightie in the middle of the city.

On my way upstairs in the lift I came across an old writing friend. She was attending a conference with another woman and seemed preoccupied even after I told her about the death of my friend’s daughter. I’d have thought she’d be able to show more interest but no. She left me alone with the burden of my grief.

It was as if I could not stop telling people about my sadness at this young woman’s untimely death. Other friends came by and I told them, too. They seemed more empathic but I had the sense that no one could really appreciate this loss except me and the girl’s parents.

Finally, I came to my hotel room but it was occupied by cleaning ladies who were making up the bed. I told them why I had come and they offered to leave the bathroom till last. A man came by, another hotel worker, who noticed on the table, just as I did, a screwed up wad of bank notes. A tip, I thought, as did the man because he took it up and commented that they’d have to share it around and how unfair it was not only to have to share it among themselves but also with the establishment.

In the next minute my husband’s mother arrived and I felt awkward in my half nakedness. She chased after me to give me a towel but I closed the door behind me fearful that she might disapprove.

Then the alarm signalled the time to get up.

2011-11-07T17:23:00.000-05:00

dreamed I found animal skins in the woods and called them "stories." Then I dreamed that I wrote poems out of my own hair; I used tweezers and glue to arrange the hair into shapes of letters.

2011-11-01T06:00:00.011-04:00

going to piano lesson in Maidenhead with Mrs Rhodes I have to take a taxi the young taxi-driver is late & tells me how hard his life his problems – why he’s late have I got my black bag with my music in it? Yes – he has to stop because driving on the footpath there are children in the way – they move over he continues – turns right instead of left in the town & I’m confused I know this town but where am I? I get out & realise I don’t know the address – I go into a shop, stationery, toys, & ask to use their phone – first they find their own phone/address book – then a book with phone instructions & in despair I try somewhere else by now it’s 2.35 – the children sitting on the stairs are in the way & I push a boy down gently playfully & he rolls down leaving me room to get down ….

2011-10-31T06:00:00.002-04:00

I am in a man's house; he is quite wealthy, an official. A small group of 60s style secret agents - sort of KGB-like, swarm about. The agents warn me about the man, "He's dangerous." I counter, "But he's always been nice to me." They caution, "You've only been to Level I with him, you've no idea what happens at Level II."

While he is an 'important' man he seems a classic narcissist, and perhaps even worse than that. In the dream he is hypnotic, and like a snake, dangerous, and I don't know why I don't heed caution.

The man asks me to go away with him for a night or two. I agree, despite the consternation of the agents. The man doesn't seem to notice the agents, or, if he does, thinks them unimportant.

We, the man and I, are sitting in the back seat of a car, a chauffeur ready to drive us.

An agent in a dark coat appears suddenly at the open car window, and despite the attempts of the other agents to stop him, plunges a hypodermic needle into the man's stomach - only I put my hand in front to protect him and receive the shot instead.

The agents outside the car don't know what has happened. I try to speak. There is some chaos. I can feel the poison overtaking my nervous system. The man barely notices, clearly doesn't care. I can hardly move, and then I go completely blind. In the darkness, I try to whisper that I am dying but my lips no longer move.

2011-10-30T11:13:00.000-04:00

You would not call it flying, this movement in my dream, more like gliding. I hover above the ground and through mere willpower make my way down a hill. It keeps me safe from a couple of dogs on the footpath who are snapping and snarling at one another.

Before I know it, I am at the bottom of the hill and seated on board a truck like tram that makes its way along Riversdale Road. I can see ahead towards the tall buildings on the city skyline. The length of road in front of us has been pulled up and is carved open, piles of dirt and gravel everywhere.

It is for this reason, road works, that we travel in this huge conveyer type truck. It stops from time to time to collect passengers along the way. I try to keep a look out for my house but the whole street scape has changed. Nothing looks familiar. Most of the buildings are under construction. I cannot see my neighbours’ houses anywhere, nor mine.

At a point where I imagine my own house must once have been I insist on getting off the truck, insist because the driver has made it clear he only stops to collect passengers. He does not stop to let us off.

I’m furious and given that the driver will not stop, I jump off.
‘Follow that woman,’ I hear the driver say to his assistant. ‘And book her.’ I refuse to be intimidated. I am so desperate to get back home. I have work to do for which I am already late.

The man hovers behind me but he is timid, like a shy puppy.
‘Mrs Andersen,’ he says. He does not even know my name.

I shrug him off when the alarm goes off.

2011-10-26T22:09:00.000-04:00

In my dream I was in the garden at my old school in Richmond on my knees digging out weeds and re-shaping a flower bed. The weeds morphed into dirty washing, my own and my family’s. It had somehow become mixed up with washing from other boarders at my convent school and even with garments from the nuns.

Then I was back at home when I heard a noise which came from the spare room. I opened the door on a young man whom I recognised as a friend of one of my daughters. He was naked and using a radial arm saw. The action of the saw gave off a loud screeching sound and I realised then that the young man used the saw for no other purpose than to attract my attention. He wanted me to see him naked.

I became terrified at what he might do next. I fled out through the front door and onto the street. The young man followed but only as far as the front veranda and then he turned towards the back of the house and himself began to flee. I now chased after him.

By this time my husband had joined me.
‘Grab him,’ I said. The young man was now dressed and my husband might well have thought he was just a friend. Even so he grabbed hold of the young man. I explained to my husband what had happened and then turned to this young man.
‘I’ll let you go, if you agree to get help.’

My alarm went off and I woke up.

2011-10-21T07:11:00.000-04:00

I was in a room, possibly a bedroom, possibly a room like the bedroom in wch I was sleeping while dreaming this, the bedroom wch is also the room where I write & edit movies, where I read & listen to music & watch movies - possibly not. I was w/ a girl, maybe my current girlfriend in waking life, maybe not. Maybe we were working on a project together.

I left the room, perhaps I went down steps to another room, a living room. There was a screen door to a porch to my left. I saw an ex-girlfriend thru it, "Jake" - someone who I haven't seen in over a decade & who hasn't spoken to me during that time. I heard a disguised voice calling to me. I realized that it was hers & I looked at her & now she was wearing a mask to hide that it was her. I left the room thru the doorway & sd something to her like: "Oh, it's you, long time no see" & then went down the porch steps where an even older male friend that I haven't had much communication w/ for 2 decades asked me if I cd help him w/ something.

I agreed & got into a van w/ him & another guy - maybe thru an open side door. I asked about what he need help w/. He showed me a spot in the van wall where water was bubbling out. I asked him what he was going to do about it. He told me that we were going to turn the van on its side & he was going to cut a slit in the van wall & repair the pipe (or whatever) that was broken inside. He got in the driver's seat, wch had 'materialized' next to where the bubbling water was - despite that's apparently being the BACK of the van & started to drive off - w/ the other guy in the front passenger seat & me in the back.

Soon, the ocean was on our right & the other passenger & I mentioned that neither of us ever goes to the ocean even though it's so close. The road was close to & parallel to the ocean - w/ just a sandy area separating them, an area that cd be used for parking. The driver jumped out of the car, wch was going slowly, & got onto a bike in front of us - to lead the way to the parking area - leaving the car driverless. The car had become a convertible w/ no roof & no windshield & the other passenger & I were in the back. We suddenly realized that the car was driverless & that one of us wd have to get quickly into the driver's seat to take over control or the car wd crash.

The driver's bike in front of us was kicking up a huge sandstorm b/c the road was covered w/ sand. I got into the driver's seat but it was awkward b/c I'd had to climb into it from behind & cdn't get my legs into the right position. Further complicating matters was that the sandstorm & the lack of windshield were making it so I cdn't see. I cd barely make out where the road was & where the entrances to the parking area were that I was trying to get the car to so we cd work on it (even though it was no longer a van &, therefore, no longer had the wall in it that had the problem w/ the water bubbling out).

I dimly saw a 1st entrance but the brakes that I'd felt for w/ my awkwardly placed feet were barely working & the car was now going too fast for me to pull over. I was desperately trying to avoid going off the road &/or running into other cars &/or pedestrians. I'd almost slowed down enuf to get into the 2nd, & last, entrance but the car was still moving a bit too fast & I was afraid I'd hit someone or something so I kept going on the road - still w/ extreme sand in my eyes. I decided I'd slow down more & turn around.

The roads immediately got more complicated. I may've turned around but then somehow turned the car right across a bridge over a small canal - thereby making it so that I'd have to turn around again to get back over the canal again. Still barely able to see or control the car I started up a ramp wch led onto a 3 lane highway where all the cars were coming toward me. I managed to slow down enuf to U-turn again & found myself faced w/ 3 forks in the road. I tried to go back down the one on the left that I thought I'd just come from when a car started coming up it, as I had done, apparently going the wrong way - as I had.

This forced me to take the middle fork wch led to maybe 2 more choices - everything being under-construction ramps in the air by this point. I chose the left ramp choice but it wasn't even clear if there was even a complete road there. There were Jersey walls (or some such) & warning signs &/or caution tapes & the ramp was too curved for me to see if it led to somewhere where I might want to go or if it shot out into 'empty space'. I might've then seen that it DID lead somewhere safe - but still chaotic. All this happened in a very quick way - in 'a matter of minutes'.

2011-10-17T06:00:00.003-04:00

Frankie, I had another tornado dream. It's been so long. I was with a large group of people in the ocean. We were swimming out at sea, it seemed. The sky threatened storms. At a distance I watched oblong diamonds, black fleckx, among the darkening grey. The black pieces of sky began to fall from the grey like precious stones tumbling to a lower place on the horizon. Melissa Capozzi and I spotted a tornado forming in another direction. We watched it grow bigger and bigger, until then it began to move toward us. Melissa and I looked at each other. There was no land close enough to reach, so we dove under water and separated to find our own safety. I looked up from several feet below and watched the tornado pass (blissfully), as I held my breath. When I surfaced, Melissa and I said something to each other. Then I swam to some edge, where my dead grandfather, the electrician, treaded water or held on to a side or float. He was part of the group and had gone under too. I looked at his wet face, and he spoke to me. I don't remember what he said.

2011-10-16T06:00:00.000-04:00

A dream about a guy I knew in college and never much cared for. He struck me as prudish, aesthetically staid, and prematurely old. When we shared a hotel room in Toronto, his intellectual hubris irritated me. I don’t remember his name, but he was shaped like a Coke bottle, so I’ll call him Mr. Coke.

I was lying on my back on tall columns of jeans and t-shirts against a wall. I could touch the ceiling. Far below, Mr. Coke was pulling out t-shirts—quickly and gingerly, so as not to crumble the columns. He reminded me of someone trying to yank a tablecloth out from under plates and silverware. Nevertheless, every time he pulled out a shirt, the columns wobbled as though about to topple over. It was a long way to the floor, and nothing would have broken my fall.

Mr. Coke chose the same t-shirts I would’ve chosen: ironic or emblazoned with band logos.

On the ceiling the white paint looked like a sheet stretched taut over a dinosaur spine. I grasped the spine with my hands and feet and shinnied across the ceiling to the adjacent wall, where there was a small door like that of a dumbwaiter. Maybe it was an escape route! I opened the door with my foot and found...another wall! There was a phone, too, and below the phone a number written in pencil, almost illegible on the lumpy, whitewashed cement. But even if I’d been able to pick up the phone, the number would have been useless. I knew it was a cruel practical joke.

2011-10-15T08:54:00.000-04:00

over the years I've had this recurring dream... the first time that I recorded it it became section 8 of The City (1974).
recently the "old man" (I am 70) morphs into Stone Girl (she is ... young). Here is that section 8 just as it was originally composed:

8

it is the quietness
within
that makes the move
ment
of animals
going
almost
unnoticed

.an old man
was with me

he came upon
me
suddenly

his voice was
low
& rough & in

his talk
sd nothing
important

as the moon
came
animals came

we slept with
no fire

in the morning
when i awoke
he had already

gone

.i do not know
his name

2011-09-12T05:26:00.000-04:00

First Dream
My husband had come to help me carry loads of bulky items from a building to the car. The car was parked in a large lot with gravel on the ground. The gravel crunched as we walked over it. At one point I moved the car and had forgotten, so I walked too far and found myself at a bus stop.
Then I got on a bus by mistake. I asked the driver to let me off when he stopped early to let a blond woman off who was riding on the outside of the bus. He wouldn’t open the door for me. I got very upset and told him how unfair he was.
When we finally arrived at the first official stop, I got off. I sat on the bench with people waiting for the next bus and started calling my husband. At first I called the home phone number, but realized that I had to call his cell. The pad of my cell phone was very elaborate and I had a lot of trouble dialing. For instance, there were 2 ones and not both of them would register a one when I dialed. When I finally got through there was a lengthy message from my husband, not what I wanted to hear.

One Day

There was a big group of people who came to check why we hadn’t been receiving our deliveries. They handed us two magazines. There were two fish bowls on top of the counter, one holding a dead fish and one a living one. There was also a bowl of roses on the counter.
We said that previously no one had come in and sat down and said here are your magazines. The leader of the group was disabled, sitting in a kind of wheel chair. There were two young women who approached him in the hallway. I asked one of them if I knew her. She said no.

The Next Day

Everyone was bringing things down from the room. For some reason Stephan was pushing our car by hand to turn it. We were yelling at him that he was pushing it into another car. All the buildings around were wooden. We were sure that the other car was a rental and that the damage was minimal. It was true. So they drove off after giving him not a card, but a newspaper.
Then we got in our car which seemed to be red and started up a very steep hill. After we had driven only a block, I asked if anyone had checked our room. I said that I wanted to go back and check. So we turned around to do just that with Stephan commenting that it was fine because we had only gone a block.
The feeling of the street was that it was very narrow with dark brown dry wooden buildings. The damaged part of the other car, the white car, was the back right hand tail light. The car we were driving was red.

2011-09-11T12:26:00.001-04:00

Last night I dreamed I had been travelling through Europe with my husband. When we returned home it was time for me to sit an examination, something to do with completing my PhD.

I stood at one time in the Laurent café and overheard my current supervisor speaking to my previous supervisor , ‘Is she schooled deeply enough?’ he asked.

I panicked then about the examination. Maybe I did not know enough. I scrounged around in the library for a book on the topic, a thin book, yellow covered, whose title, The Seven Principles of Autobiographical Theory, left me with the feint hope that if I could absorb enough of its details I would be okay.

A man had written the book, this much I remember, but not his name, two single syllabled names, like Jay Hunt.

I took the book with me to the railway station where I planned to take the train to the examination centre. I stood on the platform of the station at the top of a ramp and noticed yet again that the flood waters had risen and were now enveloping the entire platform. I watched the waters dip into my open toed shoes. I wore lacy white stockings and worried that they might get stained from the muddied flood waters.

I waited with a group of fellow postgraduates for the number 23 train, which pulled up eventually, an old ‘red rattler’ as these trains were once called, a sort of Harry Potter train, minus the steam. I sat in a carriage with my young daughter and tried to read the basic principles of the book on autobiography. I repeated the concepts over and over in my head.

We reached our destination and in the flurry to get off the train I left the book behind. As we filed out of the station, the ticket collector remonstrated with a number of passengers who did not have tickets. I had lost my ticket too, but I was not too fussed. Although he complained about the absence of tickets, the inspector let us through.

I was still worried about the examination and somehow as part of her efforts to help me, a woman, whom I can only recognise as an old friend of my mother from over thirty years ago, invited me to have sex with her. The sex was most unsatisfactory and because we were both women we somehow connected through a hose that ran from one vagina to the other. Someone walked in on us and we rushed to a stop, shame faced and hopeful they had not seen too much.

Then I was driving this woman’s truck down Canterbury Road, weaving in and out of the traffic. I was terrified of crashing the truck and felt very out of control. I abandoned the truck for a bus trip back home to Wentworth Avenue. When it came time to get off at my stop I dropped a pile of papers I had been carrying. My long dead father, now alive and sober, offered to help me to pick them up.

The dream, in my memory, came to an end here with the cry of the alarm.

2011-08-29T07:00:00.000-04:00

Some dreaming of friends

black tulips Alan Loney likes them
broken short stems I put them together again
for him try to hopefully
Roger Horrocks was there
I don’t know why now but
enthusiastic as ever

another to do with CMc
Intense & clear but vanished
quickly

2011-08-25T23:34:00.000-04:00

I’m cast in a play, but don’t know my lines for the second half of the script. It’s a community production and rather modest in set design and costuming. There isn’t a stage, and the performance shares the same floor with the audience, a simple curtain delineating the backstage.

It’s opening night, and the play has already begun. I’m meant to go on stage in a few scenes. I am trying to get a hold of the script so I can cram my lines for the second half. I know this is futile, but I persist. I rummage through my bags and ask my castmates to look at their copies. However, I don’t want to raise any alarms, so am doing my best to seem nonchalant. Inside, though, my heart is pounding. My mouth tastes like metal. I have to speak in a whisper so that I don’t interrupt the play.

When I do get a copy of the script, my fears grow exponentially. I’m cast in a sci-fi/horror piece, and my character undergoes some fantastical transformation in the second act. I become a transsexual were-beast with a new name. In fact, all the characters transform and take on new identities. From skimming, I have no way of telling which character I am portraying and which lines to learn. To make matters worse, there are cartoon panels throughout the script. I’m not sure how we are meant to portray these moments on stage. I don’t know what to do.

As I’m trying to cope with all of this, another castmate that is backtage keeps speaking in a loud voice, disrupting the play. I keep trying to get her to quiet down, but she’s oblivious. It’s almost time for my cue.

2011-08-22T20:44:00.000-04:00

I park my husband’s car outside my analyst’s house. In my dream she lives alongside a wide curved road which is edged on either side with tea tree and rambling vines. A thick wall of green separates the road from the beach.

I have come for my usual session but it seems different somehow. My analyst is busy sorting through clothes and books and does not sit the whole time she talks to me, and she talks, talks and talks, more than I ever remember her talking.

She tells me a few ‘home truths’. She is brutally honest, she says. She needs to alert me to certain aspects of my personality, certain ways I behave that have to do with my tendency to present only half of the picture in my dealings with others.

I cover my face in my hands. I take in every word she says and feel deeply ashamed, more so because I am aware that two of my colleagues are nearby in an adjoining room. They can hear every word of our conversation through the open door. Both colleagues have names that begin with J. I shall call one J 'rage' and the other J 'prudishness'.

How can my analyst say these things to me within their earshot I wonder? I say nothing and she does not let up until it is time for me to leave.

I am outside again on the street but now I cannot find my husband’s car. I am convinced that I had parked it immediately across the road but it is nowhere to be seen. Other cars line the street but none of them is mine.

I talk to people who go back to their cars, one or two of whom I recognise as other colleagues. They do not know where the car has gone. Eventually and reluctantly I revisit my analyst to ask if I might use her phone to call the police and to report the car as missing. She lets me in although she is still busy sorting. Her husband is more sympathetic than my analyst when he overhears talk about my missing car.

Through the front windows of my analyst’s house I see my husband’s car driving down the road as if the driver is about to park. The back of the car is covered in scratches and is dinted on one side. I rush out onto the street thinking to at least get a look at the thief who has presumably taken out my husband’s car for a joy ride.

Another of my colleagues has also recognised the car and I can see her from the front steps of my analyst’s house as she tries to get the driver to stop. She hangs onto the side door handle as the driver swerves to get away. I wish she had not done this as I do not want the thief/thieves to know we have seen them.

In trying to escape from my colleague the car swerves, hits another parked car, goes into a spin and crashes. Through the force of the crash the entire roof peels off and the car comes to a stop, a pulverised piece of twisted metal, with its occupants still seated within the security of seat belts.

There is a group of five in the car and the driver is a young woman I do not recognise. An older man in the back seat snarls at me as I move in to remonstrate with them for stealing my husband’s car. They seem too dazed to make a run for it, and I wake up.

2011-08-17T08:15:00.000-04:00

I don't remember when I realized I was in the dream, but I remember it felt normal.

I am in an MFA program and this dream was taking place in an MFA program. The only difference was that this wasn't taking place in a writing program; it was taking place in a mixed martial arts program.

The classes did not involve any physical contact.

I remember thinking, "I am getting this MFA in the martial arts to go ontop of my other MFA, in writing, and help beef up my resume."

I do not remember the financial aspects of this mixed martial arts MFA program being considered by my dream-self. This is odd, because in real life I worry about personal economics constantly.

I remember discussing my reasons for entering the program. It had to do with the fact that it was very much a philosophy degree, but less rigorous possibly, and also a "cool thing to study." The problem of eurocentrism in mainstream American philosophy was discussed. Comparative philosophy seemed to be my main interest.

The classes did not involve physical contact.

I remember enjoying reading and learning about the different types of martial arts, and I remember thinking (rather, my dream-self thinking) that I was eventually going to have to take a course that met the "physical contact" requirment before I could graduate with my MFA in mixed martial arts. I remember my dream-self thinking that I would wait until the last semester.

When I awoke that morning from this dream I felt like shit in the most casual hilarious way.

2011-08-17T08:12:00.000-04:00

The wattle trees in our garden are abundant. In my dream I decide to find secateurs to cut off a few branches to put in vases. I resist the impulse to borrow my daughter’s sewing scissors for fear of blunting them. When I come up close the flowers do not seem as abundant as I had first thought but still I manage to snap off a few twigs. The flowers drop off as the twigs fall and cover me in yellow pollen.

I go inside to find vases just as my husband arrives home. The wind builds up and we go out together to check the trees, which have now disappeared. At first I imagine the wind has toppled them but soon realise someone must have chopped them down. Their stunted trucks look tiny compared to how I had at first imagined them. I am relieved that my cuts did not cause them to disappear when the alarm wakes me up.

2011-08-16T07:20:00.004-04:00

There were these ink-dark beings, sometimes resembling humans and sometimes resembling snakes, that seemed almost liquid, that we all had to protect ourselves from. They sought out human frailties and fed on them. Too much exposure would lead to a full-force attack, and would kill a person.

So what one had to do was keep all skin completely covered, so that any one of these beings (which resided in the rafters and on the ceilings of this world that seemed mostly to be a sort of large gym), could not see any human part, because that triggered a feeding frenzy.

What one did to survive was keep covered, all in black, with a series of hats, hoods, cloaks, and when an ink-dark being neared, one crouched down on the floor or ground and wrapped one’s coverings around one and played dead.

I had a soft spot on top of my head that was now bald due to an attack where I had not properly covered myself. I had to wear a black hat at all times, and be constantly vigilant, continually scanning the ceiling beams, nooks and crannies, to try to discern where one of these dark shape-shifters might be hiding. I had to keep my head bent down and my hands covered at all times, just to survive.

2011-08-15T09:23:00.000-04:00

Chris, Gideon and I looked around a store to get items to help organize our house. It seems like a home store, but I bought a purse here recently. I spoke to the saleswoman. One of us commented about the Banana Republic was back in it's original spot in the mall. I had forgotten that it moved to the other (less used) end. I said that end of the mall felt like a totally different mall. The saleswoman agreed.

* * *

We moved out of our house mid-morning and into our new house. The old owners of our new house moved right next door. The man was older, shirtless with a big fat belly. I didn't like the former owners living so close to us. Our old home seemed to be nearby too. The new owners moved in. I wasn't sure for who, but for one (or more) of us these homes were a transitional space until we moved again.

* * *

I sat in a Poets and Busboys waiting for my former poetry teacher to arrive for a one-on-one meeting. I held the Poets and Busboys pencil that he gave me, still unsharpened. I remembered that he introduced me to this place before he had his falling out with it.

(Poet 1) and (Poet 2) joined me at my table. Maybe they were meeting with my former teacher too. The two poets talked about an amazing, brilliant woman who seemed to be able to do everything. She was a poet, the most alluring and sexy stripper who men relentlessly pursued, a Playboy model who drove men wild when they saw her nude photographs and now she was a conductor. She did everything except have children, which they said was because she was too smart for men. She was to be joining them soon.

Poet 1 and Poet 2 excused themselves from my table. I got sleepy and slumped over at the table as I waited for them to return. Poet 1 brought me a cup of coffee. I saw that she and Poet 2 joined this amazing woman at another table. This amazing woman had red hair, was middle aged and a little heavy. She didn't necessarily look the part, but I knew this was her. I felt left out that Poet 1 and Poet 2 left my table for her's.

2011-08-14T09:21:00.001-04:00

I am in supervision with a friend and writer, C, in the front room of my house in which I consult. The blinds are drawn but there is a gap at the bottom through which I can see out onto the veranda.

The doorbell rings. ‘I’ll ignore that,’ I say to my supervisee. We are discussing her writing. The doorbell is a distraction but I imagine the person who has rung it will move on soon, but he rings again. I look out through the crack under the blind on the window and can see a tradesmen of sorts, in casual clothes. He talks on a telephone. His utility truck is in the driveway. I cannot hear what he is saying only the low drone of his voice which sounds agitated. I worry that he can see me and slide down onto the floor. My supervisee looks perplexed but given she happens to be a friend I think she will understand.

Eventually the man leaves. I watch him get into his car and his assistant, a woman, who appears seemingly from nowhere uses a special lift up tray to get into her seat on the passenger side.

Somehow I manage to finish the session at the end of which my supervisee asks me about my availability. She can only come on a Tuesday at 8.45 in the morning. Am I free then? I realise I am not. I share a writing group at this time. It seems to cement my supervisee’s decision to take up another proposition that has been put to her, namely to teach creative writing at the university.

I go out into the hallway and run into a man, another tradesmen, who seems to be working on the wires near the front.

‘What a you doing here? Who authorised this?’

I am furious and tell the man to get out. He is reluctant to move but I force him to pack up his bags and move out through the back door.

As I go into the kitchen in anticipation of him an elderly couple come through the sliding door. Each carries a heavy box loaded with household things.

‘Who are you?’ I ask, ‘and what are you doing here?’

The couple look perplexed, furtive. I tell them to leave as well, and begin to bolt the door so that no other intruders can get inside.

I am furious and troubled. I have been away from home and work for several days until now and I wonder whether something has gone on in my absence. Have some people tried to take over our house?

I try the telephone to ring my husband but can’t get through. I’m in a panic. They cannot simply take possession of someone else’s house. Or can they?

2011-08-13T08:28:00.002-04:00

I had been given the task of presiding over a friend’s daughter’s wedding, not as a celebrant but as a sort of pre-wedding planner, not of the practical kind, but more one who helps the bride in particular to think about what she is letting herself in for.

I took this task seriously but found myself slipping into the role of therapist. I could sense that my friend’s daughter, the bride, did not enjoy the questions I put to her, questions about what getting married meant to her. She wanted simply to have a good time at the wedding. She wanted only to party, none of this heavy serious stuff about meaning and commitment.

My friend’s mother came up to me. She took me aside and asked me to stop being so serious. It was clear she was angry with me.

Now I felt useless, as if I had failed in my task. I could no longer enjoy the wedding preparations. Somehow the wedding went on and I was not there.

Soon after we gathered for the wedding reception. No one came forward to take the role of MC and my husband moved to the microphone. I rushed up to him to warn him of what had happened to me.
‘They may not want you.’ And sure enough my friend came up to him and asked my husband to tone it down. He went off in a huff.

We were now both alienated.

2011-08-04T06:39:00.000-04:00

I had taken a drug, some variant of peyote, that maybe I'd gotten from a Brujo of sort. Instead of random hallucinations, I saw people's heads reconfigure to reflect their souls. I was in a hotel, and then in some transit center in a foreign city, very modern. Many people looked bland and passive, almost pulpy like certain breeds of dogs, but others -- way too many -- were quite obviously monsters. Some of the monsters were wandering about with children in tow -- all the kids looked beatific. I knew that terrible things were in store for them. Then at some point, I realized that the monsters could tell that I could read their souls and began to gather themselves about me. I looked for a way out and if I'd been on a high balcony or bridge I would have jumped to escape, but here on the ground floor of this transit center there was no way out, so I twisted & twisted until I woke up. I was afraid to look in the mirror.

2011-08-01T18:00:00.001-04:00

I drive out into the desert with a couple guys from work. The venue is small, the seating haphazard- it might be The Switch, or the Alice Coltrane Memorial Coliseum. It starts to fill in. Pound is reading, I manage to secure a spot next to him on a couch, along with another friend. One of them has pulled out a "Golden Book" and Pound thinks it is incredible, that it must be beyond value. We discuss children's books, and I show him a book of psychedelic children's art from San Francisco, which he finds amusing, but dismisses. Pound is very kind. He recommends I read a book of essays on labor, which he describes quantitatively, praising the symmetry in the sizes of its sections.

2011-07-31T13:26:00.000-04:00

In my dream I am with a group of women and children all familiar to me, my sisters, my daughters, my friends, and we are on a journey. I take the wheel of the car and drive through foreign streets into a wide well lit tunnel. It is as if I am driving in reverse as I need to get my head around these unfamiliar surroundings and it takes me some time to orient myself. The whole time I imagine we will crash, but as often happens in my dreams the car steers its own steady course safely through the tunnel and I manage to right the wheel in the nick of time.
Later I spend some time with my older brother.
‘I’m thinking of visiting Dad’s graveside,’ my brother says. ‘Do any of you others want to come’.
I have been trying to tidy my house while my brother makes plans. Children’s toys pulled out of order, doll’s clothes spread across the floor and bits and pieces of games and toy sets, some broken and in pieces spread around me.
I am desperate to get the place in order even as I think I would like to join my brother. What chance is there I wonder that any of the others will want to come?
In my dream my father is buried at Hall’s Gap. It is a long drive and I pitch myself forward in my imagination to his graveside when I wake up.

2011-07-25T20:24:00.000-04:00

In my dream I visit old friends who live nearby in a ramshackle house that they have partially renovated in places and in other parts left alone. I have not seen these friends for some time and their children who were babies when last I saw them have grown into young girls, preschoolers now. The older of the two prattles on about the title of a book her mother had been reading and I am impressed by her ability to articulate long and complex words. She seems almost-genius like in her knowledge.

There are other friends visiting this house friends who are obviously in regular contact with the owners, and I am conscious of feeling left out. Someone is cooking duck on an outdoor barbeque. I chat to the male half of the couple, M, about how things are for him and speculate on whether my husband might join us later. M's wife I know disapproves of him.

Then M’s wife comes along.

‘Your children are amazing,’ I say and their mother preens. M nods approvingly and looks over at his daughters . ‘They are like peas in a pod,' he says. 'One ribbon is too long for the two of them.'

My own daughter, now a toddler, trails after M’s girls. I follow them down a long laneway. We pass rabbits in hutches, rabbits that look wild and rangy. The grass here is high and the fields cluttered with junk, old tools, furniture an bits of cars. In places I notice there are maggots feeding on the dead flesh of animals long gone.

I turn the corner into the house and go into the old nursery. M’s wife has kept it exactly as it was when her babies were born. I comment on this to M who comes to wave me goodbye. 'I have kept our nursery the same,' I say, and wake to the alarm.

*

I dreamed of a baby born to a couple who did not love one another even at the point of his conception. I was responsible for looking after this baby along with several others. We took it in turns to hold him. At one stage I brought the baby over to see an old friend, M. The baby wore a dark sailor’s cap on his head which made him look older than he was.

M asked me about this baby, from where he had come and what I was doing taking care of him. As she spoke I noticed for the first time that her front tooth was rotten through. It had the grey colour of death.

‘You must stop being so generous with your money,’ M said. ‘If you’re not you’ll wind up with nothing left for your old age.’

M then asked the whereabouts of the baby’s mother. She had gone on holidays to the beach, I said. The father was elsewhere.

I took the baby to change his nappy. By now she had morphed into a female. She was asleep but needed a change. I knew because she stank. When I took off the Pilcher her nappy almost exploded and I worried for the red and burned skin on her bottom. She had been left in a dirty nappy for hours.

2011-07-22T07:48:00.000-04:00

(dreamt my last night in China 2011)

First, I go to an event, and I am on time. The Washington poet Lana Hechtman Ayers is there. Then somehow I am late. I have to crawl up through a very high window to get in the class. I have trouble, and people help me. I throw right leg over a ledge. Someone pushes me on left side, from below. Another I tell to pull my arm up from the window above, to a rung like a ladder. I finally get in the window, but the class has started already. That's where Lana is. She and several others are dancing and singing. It looks interesting. But the teacher is unkind about me being late. This bothers me, so I leave. But the class interests me too much, so I come back. But by the time I come back there are so many people. There are people from high school (Chris Limbo). There are people that worked with me in college at La Taqueria (Danny Glover). This is like the new exercise, dance-theatrical sensation. There are things each person acts out. Each person seems to be acting out their own imagined play. But somehow this happens fluidly among all others. It seems to me like a Greek chorus. People are packed tightly lin a large room, a room like a studio in which dancers practice. People practice in lines. I wake up and write down the phrase "dream of the dancing, living game."

2011-07-21T11:09:00.000-04:00

“100th Greatest Poet of All Time Berrigan” read the blue underlined headline in the Google reader on my iGoogle home page. I clicked the link and it took me to the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. “Is Ted Berrigan exactly the 100th greatest poet of all time?” the blogger wondered. The post went on to say that someone, I forget the name but it was hyperlinked, argued just that. I stopped reading and clicked on the link which took me to an article on The New York Times Website. “Ted Berrigan is exactly the 100th greatest poet of all time,” the piece began. I read a couple of more sentences, I forget what they were, but they lead into a consideration of a volume of his called Face-off. The writer explained that this was “a series of two-line quips that played off each other culminating in. . . .” My mind added the ellipsis in the dream as I began to consider my own short suite, was it any good, of interlocking two-word insult poems which I had made a couple of years ago and all but forgotten. I tried to get back to reading the article but I started to drift toward wakefulness. I heard a small cry and I thought it was my daughter, then I thought it was the cat, then I realized it was nothing, which meant I was awake.

2011-07-17T22:14:00.000-04:00

boyfriend had an affair with husband's girlfriend

I called the husband to tell him, he said don't call me, I said I have to tell you this news

at first he said hedidn't mind, saying that people were supposed to have one-night stands

but then I said it seemed more serious

and he posted something bitter on some social network, I can't remember...

I suppose I am not free. silly subconscious!

it was... where was it... there was some bank, or hotel... where there were these tropical island tours. it was near me but I had never been there.

on the lawns of the tropical island were these golden tongues

sculptures of golden tongues

they meant something... memorialized something, I am not sure what... some sort of... sea leprechauns?

and a friend lived near there with a prairie for a huge backyard... his children were frolicking there with his girlfriend... it was "India"... and it looked as though there were a huge fire in the yard, all red and purple and vivacious colors

and there were tumbleweeds, but maybe the fire was an illusion

since everyone seemed happy and unconcerned

2011-07-15T23:09:00.000-04:00

My husband called in the middle of the night to let me know his plane would be three hours late departing from the European city where he had spent the last three months. I wrote the information down on a card beside my bed, afraid I would think it a dream. Just before waking up, after I had been asleep for three more hours, I dreamed my husband was there on the couch beside me without announcing he was there. I caressed his face between my hands and said something I cannot remember to welcome him home. Then he asked me if I had seen the other woman around here. I felt compelled to keep my eyes on him and did not look around but said I had seen someone out of the corner of my eye.

2011-07-11T21:25:00.000-04:00

I was a leaf man w/ dark rich earth for my arms and vines all over.

It was peaceful.

2011-07-10T23:12:00.000-04:00

My dream featured a scene from what looked like reality TV –a gigantic case conference. A group of therapists stood up in turn to talk about their respective patients.

At one point one of the patients, a tiny dwarf like creature, stood to speak for herself.

You could barely see her above the crowd. She listed all her difficulties but did not mention the fact of her height. She was no taller than a five year old, though she had the body of a young adult.

I wanted to comment on this fact, this obvious fact that no one else wanted to acknowledge, but I got the message from her silence and from that of the crowd that I should not acknowledge it.

2011-07-08T07:00:00.000-04:00

I was walking into a jungle, incredibly dark, and that I was holding a rose before me -- a huge red rose -- this rose appears in Schizophrene, so that this, perhaps, was a dream of the edits I just completed -- a next to last phase, just now. The rose gave off a faint light, like a torch, and I held it at the level of my heart, my sternum, so that even in the dream, I understood that my command, my obligation, was to love, to open my sense beyond their given tropes, and go into it, the dark, with infinite trust for my passage through.

2011-07-07T21:43:00.002-04:00

Jerry Williams at Best American Poetry

2011-07-05T18:59:00.000-04:00

Dreamed

I was teaching a class on magical realism (which I will be, in the Fall, so perhaps this was de rigeur anxiety dream). I had been traveling, and my book was in the outer zip-pocket of my carry-on suitcase. I reached for it, but at that moment, felt a wave of caution, understanding that if I opened the suitcase in its entirety, an angel I could not manage or cope with would come out. Even in the dream, "angel" was capitalized. Even in the dream, I knew my brain was processing the question of an entity, its arrival/containment, as a metaphor for corporeal destruction (mine), but really it was something else. It was an angel [agent] of transformation, but still I could not do it. I could not look. The book was dreamtigers by Borges, a book I suspect I saw in the dream because of the man I met at the holiday barbeque last night. My friend's stepfather, he had been to India on a Mission. And showed me the photo-project book he had made after giving a disposable camera to the son of the man who had cut his hair in "Calcutta." "I said," he said, "go and take pictures of your life. We'll come back in two or three days." Then he developed one set of photos for the book I held in my hands, and gave the other to the boy. In Guatemala, he did the same with a girl who worked in a local factory, then described going into a Safeway in Loveland and weeping in the produce section, at the sight of people purchasing bananas, whose provenance and child labor costs he knew firsthand. Booklet. A jungle. A black and white tiger against a cliff in Orissa. I dreamed of Borges, and woke with the cat against my back knee, her claws retracting and opening against my skin. In the dream, I also met my Project Director at Goddard, Paul Selig. Everyone was lined up with specific questions about their health, love-life, career, etc. I said: "What do the guides want me to know?" Everyone watching said: "Oooh," as if I'd asked a selfless question. But really, I knew that the Angel was nearby, having exceeded my luggage. I knew the Angel had something to say. At this moment in the dream, I understood I was dreaming of writing. It was the same feeling in my body. For example, I know that if I sat down to write, even today, it would come in a terrible rush and days would pass and I would not be able to return to my life as it was. This is why I do not write, refuse to write until the last minute, and never begin. I wish I could invent a video game that gave a person a choice between formalizing love and never knowing the truth of their physical/family origins. A turn to the Angel represents this first choice, and risks obliteration. The second choice would be a genetics, a furthering, a weirdly satisfying or stabilizing knowledge, but nothing would happen: life would continue with a psychological basis, and perhaps a person could make art out of this, but it would not be the same as the book of light. A book that had the sun and moon inside it, like forces. That split the spine. Each time you opened it. To read. A sun-beam would rotate from the page into your left eye, and moonlight to the right. Reading: an act of rewiring consciousness, perception, the pathways of the brain. Now I want to invent an e-book that does this: that produces or emits light rays. Color healing. Imagine a schizophrenic reading Dostoevsky, and every time they read the word -- "the" -- they see a light pink pulse of light. Reading integrates a subject matter with simple, ritualized touch, and in this version, there is also a secular form of energy work that makes the reader register the light at a different rate to the word. An ordinary word, in particular, rather than a word with immense local significance. This suddenly feels important on a day when I am finishing the last edits for Schizophrene. How psychosis omits duration as a mental stage. Everything that happened is still happening, deep inside the spot. I'll stop there. Even this narrative is a way of avoiding the Angel, who has come very near, near enough to touch, behind me, as I write these words so early in the morning; my son still asleep, a freight train cutting through on its way to Laramie, birdsong, a light breeze, chai, and now the cat slipping through the ankles, mewing for her breakfast. (Milk.)

2011-07-04T16:26:00.001-04:00

I was in Gideon's preschool class. I planned to work on my manuscript thesis that was due soon so I could graduate. An annoying woman came in to teach the class, so I left with my packet full of poems and notebook. I opened my slim packet. It felt like there were 30-40 poems, but instead there were smaller envelops with word games and far fewer poems than I expected. All the poems needed drastic rewrites. For the thesis, I planned to show my work (first draft, final draft) and considered writing about the changes. I had a tremendous amount of work to do in a short period of time.

2011-06-25T22:33:00.000-04:00

last night was like every other night I
again dreamed that I was (the) Full Moon
pretending to be (a) Ripe Banana

&
when that Dumb Rock turned into "Her"
I ...erupted !

wrote a poem:

full moon
I think I'm in love
with a rock

and the this Stone Girl became my "me"

2011-06-17T06:26:00.002-04:00

My dream last night, one that I at least remembered, centered on my breasts, but I was looking at them most of the time from a distance rather than carrying them. They were like two enormous mushrooms one slightly larger than the other. They were strung around my neck on some sort of cord and I was having trouble making them face the right direction. They kept flipping backwards with the stems on the outside. Then when I got them facing the right direction and creating a little décolletage in a kind of trench coat, they’d flip back the wrong way before I knew it. Their color was golden brown and shiny and they were untamable. And that’s all I remember.

2011-06-13T07:00:00.001-04:00

I was sitting in a circa 80s school bus. I wiped frost off my window and saw a televised speech by "the dictator of Poland." On the balcony of a building like a Bavarian cuckoo clock, a giant effigy of the dictator cleaved the air with his arms and harangued the crowd in Hitler fashion. He was a Macy's-balloon-sized puppet with a loudspeaker built into his throat.
My late paternal grandmother sat next to me across the aisle, babushka'd, staring at the front of the bus, apparently unaware of me. I started singing "Anyone Who Had A Heart," wondering if she could hear me, if she knew the song, if she liked Bacharach. I felt a sentimental tenderness toward everyone on the bus, as if I'd had a drink or two. Some little boys were stampeding down the aisle and trampling one another. I thought I should intervene, as when I sub at elementary schools. I joked with one of them about the Green Bay Packers logo stuck to his forehead. "A third eye, eh?" And suddenly I was Barack Obama in a Macy's parade, marching through Manhatten, beaming and waving at the throngs of cheering onlookers. But at the same time I was watching myself as if on television.

2011-06-12T11:51:00.003-04:00

I was in a busy urban environment, daytime, much happening on the streets.
I was discovering some sort of complex, quasi-encoded creative project.
This somehow involved a map of the US w/ a few black dots on it of some
particular significance. The logo for part of it was a detail of an
Hieronymous Bosch painting that was delineated by a diffused-outline
circle. Surrounding the circle the painting was in color but the isolated
detail was in black & white. W/in the circle there was probably a Bosch
character that was semi-human - perhaps a creature w/ a trumpet-like mouth
or beak.

I had found an object created by the person behind this project. It was
like an industrial paper-towel dispenser the size of a Rolodex. It was a
cylinder, mostly encased in plastic, w/ a central axle around wch fairly
sturdy paper was wrapped on wch there was a printed interview w/ "N" - wch
stood for "Noun" but may've also been connected to "An". "N" was the
person behind the project. Also wrapped around the axle & interposed
between the paper was a layer of translucent blue plastic. Encasing these
2 layers was a hard plastic shell that only allowed access to the paper &
plastic thru an aperture. My interpretation of how this interview was to
be read was that as one pulled the paper & plastic off the spool-axle one
was to cut the plastic off to make seeing the interview-paper easier.
However, I was unsure whether I shd really be cutting the blue plastic off
as I was.

2011-05-30T23:13:00.000-04:00

Reb Livingston's recent celebrity dreams: here.

2011-05-30T07:13:00.002-04:00

I looked over the bridge at the Yarra River and watched a young woman in the water swimming for the joy of it. The water seemed clear and deeper than usual, after recent heavy rains.

‘It’s wonderful. Come on in,’ the girl called but no one joined her until out of the blue another girl splashed in from the shoreline. I had been wondering what it would be like to dive into this water from the bridge itself, not that I would do this. It was sure to be dangerous. The girls mucked around together in the water and called out occasionally to people on the shoreline.

The people on the shoreline sat in groups. Many of them had disfigured faces and scoriated skin. Most of them in some way or other had surrendered part of their skin to the ravages of fire, some on their faces, others on their chests, backs or arms. I soon realised these people had come together for this reason.

Entire families, some of whom had several members with significant scars had come together here. I took to talking to them. Their burns reminded me of the way the tectonic plates of the earth shift by centimetres every year. When one plate shifts into another, slowly and year by year, each plate moving northwards by as little as a centimetre and growing at the rate of our fingernails - the Indian plate for instance jammed up against the European - then mountains form. Just so the burned skin as it sloughs off and heals leaves layers of skin rough and patchy in places without pigment, like scrubby mountains.

And then I was with my daughter and husband on a train travelling with some of these burned people. Our train passed through a display of army vehicles, tank on tank in khaki and battleship grey. The first lot we passed were left overs from the German war. Then we passed through a collection of Japanese fighter planes, trucks and tanks. I worried for some of the people who sat near me who looked as though they might be Japanese or at least Asian. They might be as traumatised by memories of the war as might the group of Europeans.

Then it was time to go to one of a series of concerts put on for charity. I overheard one from the burns group saying that she could not bear to go to the performance put on to discuss disability. She would instead go to the one on racism, the one against racism, the one I also intended to attend with my husband and daughter.

We stood in a queue waiting to get off the train and into the theatre. My husband worried that we needed our train tickets to get in. He had lost ours but we found them again on the floor.

A couple of old friends and my older sister began to fling their arms around my husband and me, as if we were not there. I joked that I did not exist but then decided to take our daughter to change her nappy. But there were no public toilets. I decided to try to change my daughter in a corner of the garden.

She protested. It was too public, even for her a baby. I stood her in a garden bed and my daughter's feet sank into the soil as did mine. She lost her little shoes. We then struggled to find another place on firmer ground but equally private, and I changed her sodden nappy.

I left my daughter outside seemingly asleep while I planned to go to the concert. It did not seem so strange to me that I should leave my daughter alone in the foyer, until she woke and called me. She was distressed that her birthday necklace had broken and her nappy fallen had off. I decided then we might go in to the performance together, mother and baby.

2011-05-29T11:43:00.002-04:00

An African man with skin the colour of jet busked on a street corner in the village square. I stopped to watch with several other people. His act looked uninteresting until he managed in one breath to draw in as much water as necessary to blow out a waterfall of colours that came out in a burst not only of colour but of pattern. The performance went on for at least a minute and was so extraordinary that people applauded for equally long. Then the busker sent his hat around to collect signs of our appreciation.

‘Don’t give him anything,’ my companion said. ‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘I’ll only give him my small change.’

I fished around in my wallet and pulled out some coins, which I threw into the hat. It was not much money but the sound of the coins crashing onto other coins made it sound like more.

The busker’s eyes lit up and he went to hug me. I pulled away and started for my return journey back to the room in which I was staying.

I had been on holidays in this Indonesian island with a female friend who had already huffed off ahead of me. The busker followed.

‘I’ll take you out to dinner,’ he said. I did not want his advances and managed to escape through the bushes.

‘I’ll wait for you,’ the man said, ‘after you change your dress.’

I had no intention of returning but somehow I managed to get lost in my attempts to avoid him.

I walked past a raised section that enclosed a deep pit. A dog leapt up onto the wooded ledge and jumped into the water, which was visible not so far below but too far for any dog or person for that matter to scale the walls for escape. The dog tried but could not get traction. He swam around frantically and I raced off in a panic about getting help for fear the dog would exhaust itself and drown.

I went looking for help but my friend whom I found at last said there was no entranceway to this pit from the kitchen area.

I went back alone with a net on the end of a rod intending to drag the dog out. I swirled the end of the net around in the water but the dog was not there. I woke up.

2011-05-28T11:34:00.001-04:00

A poet who goes, who grows, who glows, by the numb in the number, by Who knows?, 25, published a translation, a pulp, a carnation, in The New Yorker of all places, in the heart of my dream. He was young, he was mean, he was the drop of a hat and more genius than me. He was (in parentheses) Alan something G- something, one of those sanities, those post-grad manatees or careerist wannabes, a poet-chef or con-man camping in the Andes, dazzling and brilliant and dapper when appropriate, like accepting an award or daydreaming Oprah. One of those who glows, who grows, and goes by three names, who references Han Shan, the etymology of shambles, the shimmy, its catharsis, and the history of the shaman, all by inserting the phrase catch as catch can into the first line of his jigsaw meditation on Tristan Tzara's short poem “Route.” At first I think it's nothing that hasn't been done before, or I am jealous of his connections that make me feel like a jalopy puttering in the middle of a five-lane highway, then I realize it's how he would feel too if he were me, and I see him standing in a tree over the forsythia at the edge of the woods behind the Swing-and-Slide Playset, a little boy with my hair, middle finger in the air.

2011-05-27T11:24:00.000-04:00

I dreamt I was on vacation with my wife Louisa in Philadelphia. I followed her into a large drugstore, where she needed to buy some things. I noticed my cousin Rick Kaplin and Ronnie Gerstle, both of whom I knew from Camp Kennebec in Maine, standing at a cash register behind the counter. By the time we reached the counter, Rick had disappeared and Ronnie was alone there. I forgot all the things I planned to say to Ronnie. It was as though I suddenly forgot everything I knew about him. So I asked him where Rick had gone. He said Rick had returned to his store across the street. After she paid, Louisa stopped at a high round table, where someone might sit with a coffee or a drink. She started balancing her checkbook, endlessly. Impatient, I headed outside without her, even though we were on vacation together.

The butcher shop across the street had a long, narrow entrance hall and a large room in back, ballooning out to the right. Five men were working there. “Is Rick Kaplin here?” I asked. The apparent owner pointed to a guy in the middle. It wasn’t really Rick, it was someone else. This Rick looked incredibly young. I said, “Hi, Rick, it’s your cousin, Michael Ruby,” speaking more soulfully than I planned. There was something wrong with Rick, he couldn’t look at me, he seemed to be hiding his face. He was schizophrenic, I decided. Also incredibly muscular, so overpumped he was almost toppling over, and covered with small pink pimples. “You remember me?” I asked. “I’ve gotten your emails,” he said, probably referring to emails I’ve sent out in the past announcing various books. “I don’t think I’ve ever sent you any.” “I’ve gotten your emails,” he said, his tone faintly negative. He walked slowly toward me, reaching out to shake my hand, but then he gripped my hand very hard, and I realized he wasn’t going to let go, he was going to try to kill me. Of course, it made perfect sense. Rick hated my guts, Rick hated me the most of any person in my entire life, Rick hated me with a supernatural hatred. How could I have forgotten? I struggled fiercely against the muscleman’s grip, trying to reach the door down the dingy hall. Why did the hall have to be so long? Suddenly, the tarnished bronze knob was in reach. If I could open the door, I could yell for the police. There were police on the street. At this point, I awakened from the nightmare. My first thought was: Thank God this is a dream. My next thought was: Rick can’t hurt me, he’s been dead for 25 years, struck by a taxi in Central Park at the age of 28. This was a dream about seeing my dead cousin, the person who hated me the most of anyone in my life, and he tried to kill me.

2011-05-26T11:18:00.001-04:00

A scary celebration with dark hallways and running had just taken place. Best friends were in the field with tall metal statues. Time to fly, so walk up the hill a little and run for momentum, kick off. Only got a little air between feet and ground. Heavy body; why does a light body become weighted so quickly? It was the right time to fly. Does anybody have enough energy? Now all of us on the hill, all dense perfect circle rocks thrown into a reflection pool of water, no, metal instead. Thudded slowly. Finally with exercise and practice our perfect circle bodies became aerodynamically smooth stones, and we shimmered off the hill into the air. Weaving through the metal statues some of our wings were more apt for tight turns. I had doggy-trained tricks, having watched a red Australian Cattle Dog as he maneuvers body between posts, every muscle utilized simultaneously, a block of twists and strength. As a mass we flew through a brick neighborhood, a Philadelphian metropolis, passing a sprinkler and young tumbling boys, moms in garden jeans stretching hamstrings before dealing with the peas.

Excited with hopes of future kisses, going to the house of the boy I loved who didn't love me yet but his family would. The wood floors would squeak as I walked to the guest bedroom at the entrance of the house for a blanket; pulled off the bottom quilt, the pillows atop moving with the tug but ending up still on the bed, a clean swipe. Mom of the house was being a host with older brother's friends, and watched as I ruined her organization. "I will fix it." Outside with blanket I was the hero watching out for the continuation of clean dry butts. Sun would've been the hero if I wasn't here.

My own mom came to pick me up as if from a sleepover birthday party, too much pizza and staying up all night scared of being alone in a room full of girls all better friends than me despite my having known all of them for longer. So glad to see mom.

2011-05-25T11:09:00.001-04:00

The crowd -- friendly, well-behaved -- hampered my progress though Logan Airport. For compelling reasons hard to articulate now, I was lugging documents under both arms. These burdens challenged my command of time and space when fishing for wallet, blackberry, whatever. Yet I brushed aside offers of help.

I was en route to the college from which I had graduated 36 years ago. The taxi made good time till Memorial Drive in Cambridge, where the engine gave out. Rather than apologize, the driver thought I should compensate him extra “for the music.”

He had underestimated me if he thought I was going to pay for what the taxi’s radio had supplied, don’t worry. Besides, hadn’t I put up for miles with a gyros sweating on the spit in the passenger section? Assured of the justice of my position, and braced by the opportunity to show my skills as an oral advocate, I told him "Fuck YOU!"

Relatives of the cabbie converged on the scene as if for a wedding rehearsal -- children and elders, male and female. They surrounded the vehicle in an unthreatening manner.

The meter read $4.90. I gave my driver a five and moved on to new challenges.

From where I stood beside the highway, a rustic path led uphill to where the "river houses" might well be. The layout, the landscape: Things had changed since my college days. There was no telling for sure what lay beyond the forested ridge where the path, longer and steeper than it had looked at first, took a turn into some trees.

A physical sensation of unfairness welled in me, coupled with doubts about the necessity of my mission. Its precise scope was growing elusive, too. Had it ever been evident beyond this point? The important files I was carrying felt heavier than ever.

2011-05-24T11:06:00.004-04:00

I'm in an industrial type space w/ a huge baywindow
overlooking a desolate landscape that's pitted & has no vegetation
- it seems to be mostly or all clay. I'm there w/ someone else,
maybe another guy. We're there to procure a giant vehicle,
I think for time-travel. Outside the window, there're at least 2 types
of vehicles visible. The one we're to use is huge, like a heavily armored
tank or some type of land-mover. They have a solid wall on their fronts
w/ a cluster of giant hole-saws. All around us the clay of the surface is
cracking open & rhinoceroses are emerging from underneath.
They're not struggling out of the earth - it's more as if they're coming up
standing on elevator platforms - but no such things are visible.
I don't see any of them actually completely on the surface & moving around.
The landscape w/ these rhinoceroses is menacing & the hole-saws on the
fronts of the vehicles are interpreted as being for defense. Despite the menacing
nature of the environment, wch may not be Earth, wch is more likely another planet,
the 'salesperson' that we're dealing w/ seems unconcerned about our safety
& the presumed vulnerability of the glass wall/baywindow. It occurs to me
that I have no idea how to drive the vehicle I'm about to get so I ask if it
comes w/ a driver. In a quasi-lucid meta-realization w/in the dream, I realize
that by asking this question I'm making it so that, yes, the vehicle DO come
w/ a driver & that if I hadn't asked this question the vehicle WD NOT HAVE COME
W/ A DRIVER. It's then explained to me, not necessarily by the 'salesperson'
- who may not even exist as an incarnated figure - that one of us (myself
& my invisible? companion) must agree to learn to copilot the vehicle.
I realize that doing this is probably fantastically difficult & that it's asking
entirely too much of me. Both the 'salesperson' & my companion may
just be 'figments of my imagination' or projected parts of myself.

2011-05-23T10:57:00.005-04:00

I was in a huge business complex type sprawling skyscraper type bldg in the large lobby. Perhaps there was a school group or some other type of community group there that was about to leave in a bus or some-such. A friend of mine's son was still not w/ the group & I was worried that he'd get lost so I asked him what was happening w/ him & he told me his father was coming to pick him up. His dad did so - so I was reassured & I went somewhere else.

I was doing something in another part of the bldg. I don't remember what, I have vague memories of walking thru a generic big rm - maybe w/ tables & chairs. Eventually, I decided to leave & someone might've asked me to get something for them. It was suggested that the best way to leave was on the outside of the bldg. In the dream that seemed reasonable - I thought I wasn't high up in the bldg: maybe on the 1st or 2nd floors. I went out thru a hole in the wall. The outer walls of the bldg, wch had been solid, as if finished, up 'til now, were now just metal framing that I had to climb down on & I realized that I was higher up than I thought at 1st. Already climbing down the side of the bldg was a youngish woman w/ a baby in her arms. I may've complimented the baby. As I started to realize how high up we were I might've suggested that we climb back into the bldg. In the meantime, the woman told me that she was from Virginia(?), specifically Newark(?) (even though the Newark I know of is in New Jersey). She had seemed 'sane' at 1st, despite her climbing on the outside of a skyscraper w/ a baby, but then she started asking me about my reading her notices in some publication in the area where she was from. Since I was just 1st meeting her, I didn't know anything about what she was talking about & I realized that her thinking that I did indicated that she was a paranoid schizophrenic w/ delusions that I was omniscient or some-such. I deduced from what she sd that she was looking for a person she knew but hadn't seen for a long time &, at some point, I further deduced that this was either Franz Kamin or that she thought I was Franz.

We tried to re-enter the bldg. We had footholds in that thick plastic mesh that's sometimes used as fencing on construction sites & there was some sort of close-together wiring or mesh that blocked our way into the bldg. There was another young woman, maybe more, on the inside who was irritated by us or maybe just by the woman w/ the baby & who was reluctantly helping us move the obstacle out of the way. The tension between the personalities was contributing to our not being able to get inside. I stayed calm & reasonable & practical. The baby was helped thru the gap but then the mother was unable to get herself thru - the climbing was too difficult. I noticed that she was wearing flip-flops so I suggested that she remove them so she cd get a better toe-hold in the mesh we were standing on. This worked & then I got inside too.

I had, perhaps, started out on the 7th floor & was now, perhaps on the 5th floor. The bldg was still like a large commercial bldg - maybe a huge hotel. The woman & I parted & I went into a large rm where I saw that Franz Kamin was sitting. My past in this bldg was now as if I had decided to leave while performing in one of Franz's pieces. I walked to where Franz was & bent over his shoulder to say something to him. He was very neatly & cleanly dressed. I noticed in the large rm that he was sitting near the perimeter of that there were round tables w/ papers on them that people were sitting around & I concluded that they might be assembling one of his publications - perhaps as presents for them to receive b/c they'd stayed to the end of Franz's performance.

Franz & I talked to each other & I mentioned that the woman I had met was looking for him & that I thought her name was Susan or Suzanne & that she was from Virginia & that she had a child. Franz seemed to know who I was talking about & gave slightly cynical laugh, acting somewhat relieved that she hadn't found him, & asked if the child were about 10. I remembered the child as a girl around that age & sd yes. I then went to an elevator to take a safer way down thru the bldg.

The elevator started going sideways & I realized that it was more of a train that started in the bldg - perhaps some sort of courtesy vehicle for patrons of the hotel. I noticed that I was barefoot & realized that if it was cold outside I'd have a hard time of it. Then I checked to see if I had money in my pockets so I cd take some sort of transport when I got off the train - perhaps a taxi. I realized that I'd lost my money along w/ my shoes & that no taxi-driver wd pick me up w/o shoes anyway - assuming that I'd be indigent. Thinking that the train wd just take us outside the bldg, I was surprised when it kept going. It stopped somewhere not too far away & I asked one of the passengers whether it went further. he told me that it went to a place the name of wch I didn't recognize but wch I thought wasn't too far from my destination so I decided that I'd be able to walk barefoot from there.

I exited from the elevator/train at this next exit - wch was at the outside of a European-style large park / plaza w/ some sort of wall surrounding it w/ large archways opening regularly into it. The outside of it was dotted w/ small café type tables & there were vines growing on the walls. Perhaps there was some topiary. the same woman who'd previously had the baby/10-yr-old-girl exited the train ahead of me, although I hadn't previously seen her there, & bent over at the waist so that her short dress hiked up over her ass to reveal that she wasn't wearing underwear & was, therefore, naked w/ her ass exposed to me. She looked over her shoulder to smile at me & to say something, presumably sexual, that I didn't quite hear. She didn't have a child w/ her anymore & didn't really look like the earlier woman but I thought she was the same person. Apparently, she liked me.

We walked together, perhaps we were going to my destination together, & she asked if there were someplace where she cd get a drink. We were inside the plaza/park now & I sd, yes, being somewhat familiar w/ this park, & told her that there were food places about & then we saw one directly ahead of us.

2011-05-22T10:56:00.000-04:00

I was walking into a toilet at a mall, possibly Broadway, an Asian man half my age was going through the door at the same time. He said "We have the same coats". I was wearing a long black lightweight jacket which I'd bought at In Denial in Glebe years ago. It was a similar shape to his but noticably different. "It has the same logo" he said indicating the square black sew-on patch on his jacket that was unlike the silver printed one in the same place on mine.

By then we were alongside the urinals. I moved to the furthest corner one. He followed me and stood uncomfortably close. He was looking at me as the urinal I was using changed into a circular chrome grate in the floor. It had had a Duchampesque appearance when we walked in. He was looking at me in a friendly way as he stood next to me directing his stream of urine at the same part of the grate as mine. Then without moving he was slightly further away and urinating on me, firstly on my shoes and then gradually aiming higher up my legs. "Hey" I said or thought I said. He looked as if he was pleased and expected me to be. I knew I couldn't stop him and although he was slightly shorter than me and not an obvious physical threat he had complete control of the situation. He leant back and I could feel and taste his warm slightly sweet slightly vinegary urine flow into my mouth over and between my lower teeth.

I woke with a subtler version of the same taste in my mouth.

2011-05-20T11:38:00.001-04:00

I was outside a large bldg, probably someone's home, maybe a big party was starting. The area I was in was like a patio surrounded by plants. I had just gotten some records. My neighbor in waking life, Mark O'Connor, had picked one out for me & was playing it on a device that was outside near where I was. He wanted me to listen to it. It was by a Spanish musician named "Raf". At 1st it semed vaguely like electronica. I walked over to where the turntables were to take a close look at the record & saw what might've been a circular shallow pool - like a fountain but w/o water spouting in it. The bottom lip of the bowl-like bottom of the fountain was about 2&1/2 or 3 feet off the ground. On it there was an approximately 3 foot long piece of what looked similar to model railroad track - w/ a slight curve for a few inches at either end. At 1st I thought that this was some sort of new playback device for a new recording medium - perhaps invented by Raf. I looked at the end to my right & thought I saw some sort of little object like an optical reader. I looked closer at the whole thing trying to figure out how it worked, looking to see if there was some sort of flat object moving on the 'track' being read by the little object at the end but concluded that there wasn't.

On a pole rising above & behind this 'track' there were a few, maybe 3, turntable like objects stacked above each other separated by enuf distance so that they cd be clearly seen w/o blocking each other. They were each protruding from one edge of the pole, the 'front' from my perspective, at about a 30° angle downward. Each of them had on it what looked like a record but larger than 12" - maybe 15 or 18". I looked at each one, moving my gaze up from the bottom, until I reached the top one - wch was the only one that was spinning. As such, I concluded that that was the Raf record that I was hearing. As I looked at the record I cd see a sortof hologram above or in front of it that showed the guys who were making the music. As w/ most dream descriptions, what this 'was' is likely to be pinned down by any description here. In the dream, I simply saw an image of these 3 guys w/ a somewhat lo-fi image quality & truncated as if by a screen edge that wasn't there. There was a musician playing an instrument on the left & a guy singing, who I deduced to be "Raf" in the middle - w/ a 3rd guy somewhat hunched over to the right, possibly singing - the furthest away from my viewpoint. Their visual presence didn't obscure my view of the large disc.

I was a bit disappointed by these guys b/c the more I pd attn to them & their music, the less imaginative they & it seemed. The guy I presumed to be "Raf" had what I'll call here a 'horseshoe' mustache - a mustache over the lip w/ 2 perpendicular lines of hair on either side of the mouth growing down to the chin. He had medium length head hair & looked fairly 'normal' - just a bit scruffy as if he partied alot & didn't have to look 'presentable' for a job. Having lost interest in the music by now I wanted to take the 'record' off but cdn't see any easy way of accessing the 'turntable' - wch was maybe about 6 feet above the pool of water & set back 18" or so from the lip.

I looked at my hand & realized that I had about 5 shards stuck in it that I hadn't previously noticed. There was at least one sliver of glass & the rest were possibly metal objects - one like a finely machined part. I Pulled each of these out of my hand & saw that the part had left behind a hole maybe a quarter inch in diameter that wasn't bleeding profusely but that was bleeding enuf, & open enuf, to need attending to.

I went into the house wch was, I slowly realized, more of a palace - w/o the typical magnificence of one. I was searching for a bathroom & a medicine cabinet (or some dream-world vague thing perhaps like it) so I cd clean & wrap my hand but all the bathrooms had lines of people waiting to enter them - although b/c the giant foyer I was walking thru was so large (no end in sight - at least 40 or 50 feet wide) it wasn't glaringly obvious that these lines existed. Apparently the 'party' (some sort of social event) was starting in earnest & there were now alotof people there so every bathroom, & there were probably alotof them, had people waiting. The large foyer or hall that I was walking thru was plush but not glacially untouchably so as a museum wd be. It was well-furnished - perhaps w/ such things as oriental rugs & vases & chairs & such-like - & seemed comfortable - w/ everything well-crafted - as might be expected in the home of people who can afford objects made by artisans - but there was no feeling of class snobbery.

I awoke while I was still looking for a bathroom where I cd clean my small wounds.

The thing about many of these descriptive details is that they were more like amorphous things that seemed appropriate to fill the atmospheric gaps rather than fixed concrete objects. Imagine walking thru a space & having a part of yr mind instruct a storehouse of images to furnish the room & having these furnishings only sortof become 'real' - solid enuf to appearances but potentially shape-shifting w/o this shape-shifting even being important enuf to notice. Most of my description above of the more banal details are more like 'filler' - what I'd somehow 'expect' or 'want' such a space to be like - rather than anything actually solid.

There was a car, a Jaguar (but not really), on a hill, perhaps, & I had some casual connection to it - perhaps I had taken on the responsibility of closing its door or some such. As I was doing whatever I was doing I noticed that there was a panel of sorts protruding from the side of the car & that easily visible inside this panel there was an array of keys. Since it was my intention to secure this car from theft by closing the door I realized that this array of keys was easily accessible from the outside & that, therefore, the car cd be easily opened w/ them & then driven away. I decided to try to close this panel - but it didn't seem physically possible.

People were behind me talking about this car & discussing the difficulty of selling it for the asking price of $500,000. Sometime around this time, a woman in her 50s or 60s w/ whitish hair saw me asked me I'd like the job of coming & sitting w/ the car from time-to-time - sortof like the way people house-sit in Switzerland to make houses seem occupied while the people who live there are away to prevent squatting (this comparison being a waking one & NOT one made in the dream). I explained that I don't really like cars & that I wdn't really be an appropriate person to do this. In the meantime, the car had probably grown - perhaps no longer exactly a car anymore. The woman explained that all I had to do was hang out at the object (perhaps no longer a car at this point) & that I cd watch outdoor movies from the hill (or some-such). This started to seem like it might be fun so I sortof agreed to do it. By now I may've been standing on the deck of this object - wch was now a boat. The woman was off the boat, near its back, & she realized that she wanted me to sign some paperwork.

This may be out of sequence. The car was somehow outside of a sortof bay/parking-space/driveway cut into the ground for it that had a slight depth to prevent the car from rolling forward out of it. The woman pushed the car up to its capture point in the bay to secure it.

Back on the deck of the car-turned-boat, the woman joined me & the boat started to roll forward - the bay hadn't successfully contained it. It was going downhill, picking up speed & going in more & more dangerous areas - such as along a tree-lined sidewalk where people were. The boat was also getting bigger - although its growth wasn't something visible - it was just that it wd be one size & then a bigger size. I advised the woman to jump off the back while she cd & she did so. By the time she did the boat's back was probably at least 10 ft above the ground & was also moving fairly fast so it was remarkable that the older woman cd jump off w/o hurting herself. I wasn't sure whether to jump off but after the woman jumped off it seemed too dangerous for me to do so.

The boat was obviously increasingly headed toward conditions under wch it wd be more & more difficult to control. I shouted off its back to people to throw me a rope so I cd tie the rope to the boat & try to stop it. Some people tried to do this but they had no skill w/ the rope & I got impatient & somewhat angry w/ them b/c of their inability to even throw the rope at all. I searched in one of the rms of the boat & found an abundance of thin yellow rope, perhaps plastic-coated, that was on top of a table - w/ one end of it partially threaded around the walls near the ceiling as a decoration. I started gathering up the rope, even though it seemed too thin to be strong enuf, & taking it toward the boat back - w/ the way the one end of the rope was laced around the rm making it difficult to move w/ it.

When I got to the back of the boat again it was going down a ramp into a body of water. I was again considering jumping off but as it went down the ramp the back was now very high & jumping off wd've been very dangerous. There were people in the water below & I shouted down to them asking how deep the water was - hoping I cd jump into it & not break my legs on the bottom or drown in the process. The people were so far away that they looked very small. I looked toward the front of the boat to see whether I was about to head out to sea & was surprised to find that not far away was another ramp at the end of the space I was in & that that part was indoors. As such, I was in little danger of going any further. The people in the water were trying to turn the boat sideways so that its momentum wd be stopped by its becoming wedged in the now-smaller space. Somehow I managed to luckily pivot the boat up on top of a railing surrounding this docking area w/ an effortless shifting of my weight & that was that: the boat was stopped & turned sideways - out of the water & up on the railing. Stopping what had previously been a juggernaut-like motion had taken nothing but an unconscious shift of my position. On the ground a man commented that he'd come all the way to Jamaica for this - & I was surprised to learn that that's how far the boat had careened (w/ its presumed point-of-origin having been somewhere on the NE coast of the US).

WAKING NOTE: This seems to be a typical dream for me insofar as I think I've had many dreams where something small grows into something big & out-of-control. What may be unusual is that it stopped so effortlessly & had a 'happy ending'.

2011-05-09T07:51:00.002-04:00

In my dream I am devastated by the news that I only received a score of 155 out of a possible 250 for my English literature creative writing assignment. I had hoped for a score closer to two hundred.

How could it be?

Once the shock had worn off, I went to tackle my teacher about it. My teacher was new to me. He took fifth form students for literature and had seemed friendly enough. He was gay and seemed familiar to me, a cross between my hairdresser and other gay men I have met over the years.

I gathered that he had heard I was upset and was prepared for my tirade, but not as much as I was when ranted at him about the mark. Even I was surprised.

I have never gone to battle over the results of any of my assignments, but this one seemed particularly unfair.

A mark on an essay somehow becomes the mark of a person and for me especially my literature essay. I had worked hard on it. I had done my best.

‘What’s wrong with my essay?’ I asked.
‘Too many ideas,’ my teacher said. ‘Too many ideas threaded together. It’s hard to follow.’

This infuriated me more. To me, my teacher now seemed such a creature of his times, a simpleton who wanted ease of reading and limited complexity.

I could not concede that he might have been correct in any way, though his words nagged at me because I had been criticised before for too much complexity, too many ideas in my writing.

‘I might try to find another teacher,’ I said, and even as the words slipped out I knew it would be impossible for me to slot into another class so late in the piece. My literature exam in my dream was part of my final year at school. I could not find another school nearby whose literature class would take place at the same time of day.

I was stuck.

2011-05-08T15:43:00.004-04:00

May 5, 2011

I had fallen asleep with the intention of having Robert Kelly's collaboration with Brigitte Mahlknecht (The Garden of Distances) lead me into a dream that would, in the morning, allow me to formulate an essay about Robert Kelly's poetics for the Logic of the World: Poetics of Robert Kelly symposium.

The dream was an expansive geography -- as if I was in a video game simultaneously aware of the map and where I was on it. I was following my old boss, Derek Owens, out of a small doorway at St. John's University (where I recently quit my job) and into woods. Not wilderness, but woods cleared by smooth paths. I was aware that Derek did not want me following him, but the dream had no other purpose and I had a strong desire to do so, so he didn't have a choice. He led me to a circle of houses, and I entered one of them. I was very happy to see that there were lots of people there including Lee Ann Brown and her daughter Miranda. My daughter was there with some of her friends who are boys, and they all wanted to play football. So I said ok, let's play football in the house. (There wasn't any furniture.) I found a huge blue ball and started throwing it around, but realized that it had holes in it and so was letting out lots of air. I then realized that beetles were eating the ball from the inside, which really grossed me out. I tried to throw the ball far away from the house, but it landed only a couple feet from the door. Derek (who was outside) took the ball and tried stuffing it into a hole around the side of the house but this was very upsetting to me because I didn't want the beetles anywhere near the house. So I went outside (not where I wanted to be) and tried to pull the ball out of the hole where he had stuffed it, but it kept getting longer and longer. Obviously there was a part of it that was stuck for good.

2011-04-26T06:00:00.001-04:00

we were somewhere

we were somewhere. a
piano bar. NYC. The
Plaza. parking garage.
suburban Super 8.
inside a hospital.
the event was over.
making our way back.
not us. but me guiding.
others. friends.
through the maze of elevators
attempting to follow
the right color carpeting.
not to home,
but to the next thing.
part of the journey entailed
driving over
a broken wooden bridge.
in the piano bar or maybe
audition. a tall weird-looking blondish man
stops singing and recites a poem.
he wants a bride.
the sincerity and naked belief
of his confidence. but
mostly the rhyming.
in the moment that rhymes
with pray I shout something.
a different ending to his
poem, that yes, rhymes.
exiting before folks have
a chance to recognize
what’s just happened.
i find the room. the
party. the shower. the
card game i am supposed
to be at.
not expecting to see you
at the end of all dreams
a dot on the map

2011-04-25T18:43:00.002-04:00

I dreamed of a man on a tram who had been involved in a vicious attack that had left him cut and bruised. Somehow I took him from the tram and into my car in a bid to get him to the police station where he might get help.

I can see him now cowed and bleeding, his dark suit torn. He was slumped in the back seat of my car, which I managed to parked in the front of the police station in Bridge Road in Richmond.

Then later I dreamed of helping a friend, T, get to the airport. On the way to the airport she needed to borrow my car, which morphed into a three-seater bike with room on the back for passengers. T sat in the back with her young daughter, but their weight was excessive and caused the tyres to flatten. In only a few minutes they needed to get off the bike and walk.

I offered to take them to the airport thinking we had hours to spare. As it turned out they told me had left their run very late. For an international flight it is best to arrive at the airport at least two hours before the plane’s departure, but they now had only two hours left and still needed to get to their own home from my house to pack. I did not tell them they would not make it before they pulled away from the curb.

I noticed then on the main road in front of my house two of our cats squabbling over a lump of meat they had found on the edge of the road. I worried that a car might hit one of them and sure enough it did.

Our cat Mollie’s leg seemed to have been broken presumably after being hit and I went onto the road to lift her ever so gently and take her inside. She whimpered in my arms as I held her as carefully as I could so as not to dislodge the bone further.

It was almost impossible to get across the veranda of my house and into the living area where I had planned to telephone for the vet. Some one had removed several boards from the veranda and it was elevated higher than it is in real life. I could not get over this obstacle course with a wounded cat in my arms. Still I tried.

2011-04-21T21:23:00.001-04:00

Dream of Franz

The dream catcher caught me.

I have the hook in my arm to prove it.

I went to sleep and woke up in Franz’s apt.

Boy was it a mess. He looked the same. Greasy hair,

Clothes all in disrepair.

But I walked over to him and explained that there was no time to lose

I have waited so long anyway and now it is clear.

I laid out my case.

That the other stuff doesn’t matter

That I certainly was not going to be a poet

And I would care for him.

Robert Kelly was there riding a brown horse which

He made kneel so we could all pet it.

Many others were there some I know Quasha, Kim, Mitch more than I can name.

He seemed to approve the declaration and all that it implied

Franz said to me was that he didn’t want to wait any longer

Transaction accomplished, I admired his view overlooking the ocean,

What a little skin prick can trigger.

2011-04-15T13:40:00.000-04:00

March 14, 2011

Also, dreamed a few days ago that Anne Waldman was all in pale pink and with a pink unicorn horn and she had everyone stand back to back and touch their unicorn horns together. I wrote to her the morning after the dream. She wrote back: "Bhanu, it sounds like some kind of...initiation."

2011-04-14T07:51:00.000-04:00

Dream 11 April 2011

My dreams this morning seemed fractured after a fitful night’s sleep. I remember sitting in a church and the priest in the pulpit decked out in magisterial robes, gold braid and white satin spoke only in Italian. When the organ blared out the first notes of music it became clear that not only would he speak to us in Italian he would also sing, and sing he did.

Solo in a vibrant tenor’s voice that in places bordered on soprano. His voice was high and distinctive. He could sing and he knew it. Only when he sang did he manage to smile.

After the service was over the tall and thin Italian priest morphed into a woman, an older woman with dyed black hair and pale skin. Her cheeks were hollowed out with wrinkles and in her ears she wore a stunning pair of earrings, hooped gold with a single pearl fixed in the centre of each hoop.

She stood in the churchyard with one of her grown children and spoke to me about how difficult it had been for her since her husband had died when she was only 72. Life had not been the same since. She looked as though she had led a good life with plenty of money and beautiful things around to amuse her and yet she seemed unhappy.

She was like a character from the movies.

Dream 14 April 2011

I am drawn to pick up a shoe I have found under an outside chair in the garden. It belongs to a woman I know only through blogging. I have never seen her before but I recognise her by her blog name. She is tall, thin and glamorous, with an American accent.
‘I like your shoe,’ I say to her, hopeful that she will let me try it on.
‘You can buy it if you like,’ the woman says. ‘It doesn’t fit me. It's too tight around my ankles’.

I pick up the shoe and notice a tag with a $5.00 sign attached to the buckle. The shoe is made of some strange plastic looking leather and is red, bright red, my favourite colour and I am delighted when it fits. I call it a shoe but it more like a sandal, though the straps are thick and the toes are covered.
‘I’ll buy it’, I sty, ‘but where’s its partner.’

We search the garden for the other shoe. My blogging friend is nonchalant. What’s five dollars or a lost shoe to her, a shoe that does not fit anyway, but I am determined to find it. The first shoe fits so well. It is exactly what I have been looking for.

On the veranda atop a wide edged pot plant I see a glimmer of red between the roots of the pot plant. I pull at it to discover the shoe, which has somehow become overgrown with the roots of this plant such that is entirely covered. I will have to hack it out of the pot and its bracken prison.

I grab hold of a long knife from the kitchen and a large serving fork, not that either will be any good for the job but I can see no other tools. Besides I decide I will ask my husband to help me and he will know what to do.

I swing the knife and fork over my head in a dramatic gesture, as if I am preparing to slice someone or something up, aware that I must be careful. I am like a child with a big stick. Children swing sticks around their heads with little concern for the consequences, until someone gets hurt.

I wake up before any harm happens, still longing for my shoe.

2011-04-13T07:48:00.000-04:00

The first dream (which becomes the dream within a dream):

I'm shooting a movie. It's completely surprising because I'm the star, picked from nowhere, and my costar, is THE totally hot famous older Scottish actor. We have to do a scene where we dance close. We do the scene over and over. He obsessively fingers the dimples in my lower back and whispers things like "this is where the gold collects." This is somehow secret from the camera.  This is the best dream ever.

I wake up (still dreaming) to find myself in a resort hotel with tons of guests, very busy. I'm in a bathing suit, with a big canvas beachbag over my shoulder, in which I carry a painting I did to capture the feeling of the movie dream. It's my most dear posession. I guard it carefully. I see the actor and his wife, they part ways.  He notices that I'm carrying this painting in my bag. He says it's his, he painted it, that I stole it. He does not recognize me but we contest the strange mutual artifact (the painting) that links us.

Running, with the painting in my bag, I realize that I am very late for an appointment with my mother, who has set up a resorty thing for us to do: a simultaneous bungee jump out of a helicopter over the ocean. I'm five minutes late. It's too late to jump.  And I'm secretly glad that I missed it.

2011-04-08T08:31:00.000-04:00

Dream 4 April 2011

In my dream I woke up and staggered into the hallway. There in the dim light of early morning I could see that unbeknown to us, someone had come during the night and taken out whole sheets of leadlight from the front door. All the stained glass that lined the inside and outside panels of the front door and overhead had been taken out and smashed.
I could see out onto the street through the exposed panels.

‘The insurance will cover it,’ my husband said, nonplussed. But I knew we would never be able to replace this leadlight. An artist had crafted it for us.

As calm as my husband seemed, I was desperate. I rang the police in a panic. It was seven am and I began work in an hour.

The police officer on the other end of the telephone line was sympathetic as I tried to report the damage.

Small children whizzed around my knees, two of my own children and their cousin, all around eight to ten years of age. They played rough games. Each had a spatula, which they used to dig into the garden and bushes.
‘Be careful, ‘I said, between sentences, to the policeman.

My youngest daughter, about three years old, toddled up to me. She was naked and draped in a towel following her bath. The police officer overheard her voice and began to ask questions about my children. I explained that we had been living in the neighbourhood for years and although we had young children, my husband and I were old. I offered to go to the police station myself to make the report but then realised I did not want to leave the house unattended, not with an open front door.

I looked again at the shards of glass on the veranda and the strips of wood that had once held the leadlight in place, and were now shattered across the garden. I feared the culprit might have been someone I knew, an eighteen-year-old woman with whom I had worked some time ago. I knew she had been angry with me. Whoever it was, this person had caused thousands of dollars in damage.

*

Dream 6 4 11

The surgeon was to operate on my hand. I had stayed in hospital and there I met a friend G whom the surgeon was also treating. He was a gynaecological surgeon and at one time during my stay I overheard him in conversation with a colleague.
‘I cannot bear to penetrate the women,’ he said and proceeded to tell his colleague of the trouble he went to in his attempts to reassure his female patients that he conducts his practice purely out of necessity.

I challenged him on this and he raised his eyebrows in dispute. He seemed uncomfortable that I had overheard him and later when he came to see me to check on the wound he had made on my hand he was alarmed. It would not stop bleeding.

Then I realised the surgeon himself was ill.

He lay down on the couch fading by the minute and my friend G who had also been ill began to administer to him.

Earlier I had overheard G’s husband express grave concerns for her health and now here she was nursing the surgeon. I felt jealous. I wanted to do this job, but the best I could do was assist as her second in command.

2011-03-31T09:45:00.000-04:00

I woke up and I was chasing three of my friends threw a suburban water park. They had "borrowed" (stolen) my laptop. One of them was holding my laptop above his head. They jumped into the water. I jumped in too. I had asked them what they were doing with my laptop and they didn't answer me. I was afraid to demand that they return it to me. I was chain smoking as I waded after them through the pool. There was an artificial cascading slope with the water flowing upwards and this made sense. I followed them up it and the water carried me up the slope. Water was splashing on the laptop. The bottom of the laptop was coming apart from the rest of the laptop. They entered the deep end of the pool. My friend couldn't hold onto the computer anymore because he had to use his arms to tread water. It dropped into the water and began to float away. I swam to it and picked it up. I reached the side of the pool and put it on the light gray concrete. I woke up and my laptop was laying on the ground next to my bed. There was tape on the sides of it because it was getting old and rotting. I lit a cigarette and looked out the window at people walking past on the sidewalk.

2011-03-30T05:32:00.003-04:00

There's nothing baby safe

earth cakes all ...................

2011-03-29T09:29:00.000-04:00

Dream 14 March 2011

I went to see a couple who worked together as joint therapists. They had an odd technique. Each worked separately or as a pair to somehow unseat their patient’s defences. They had a way of making you feel as if you really mattered for the duration of your session time. They prodded and probed. They encouraged you to take up all sorts of unusual positions, for me one that involved climbing to the top of a tower, something I would never normally dare to do, but by the end of the session as the next clients were lining up to enter the space, your time was over and you would be sent off unceremoniously as if what had just gone on for the hour before was all a charade.

After this session I needed to get home. I travelled alone but I knew that my sister and a friend who then morphed into one of my daughters travelled in parallel , but across different routes as they too made their ways home.

At one stage halfway up the side of a mountain I heard the screams of my friend/daughter and rushed to the other side to find that she had fallen into a river. There was a chance she might drown and I had to work fast to free her from underneath the branch in the river that now pinned her down. The dream went on but my memories of it stop here.

*

Dream, 27 March 2011.

I slept late and in the morning I dreamed I was staying at a friend’s house in the country, a large sprawling country estate that had been built several years earlier and was now in a state of polite decay. Things that were broken had been left that way.

There was a party in progress for the oldest daughter of the farmer who owned this property, but she was not there. She had already been shipped off overseas to enjoy a post school sabbatical, though I wondered why. She did not deserve it. She had scarcely done any work in her final school years and had only just managed to scrape through her year twelve. But her parents were indulgent and they could not see what else to do with this wayward daughter. The other daughters were more amiable and hard working. One of them was a friend with one of my daughters, which is how I found myself at this party.

At one stage one of my daughters came up to me. She was cross because I had forgotten to do as he had asked earlier that day. She had been away at work all day and had asked me to telephone another of her friends and invite her to the party.
‘I forgot,’ I said and my daughter huffed off.

It was too late to invite the girl but I rang her anyhow in the faint hope she might still come as a companion to my daughter. No such luck. The girl could not come but at least I had tried.

I wandered around the property, mock Roman statues everywhere, in some places missing a nose or an arm or the fingers on one hand. They were rendered in white painted concrete and had an eerie feel rather like a plaster of Paris figure I had seen in a photo the day before of a person sitting astride a bed, all white bandages to shape the man’s body.

I sat at a table then with two women and a young priest in black clothes. The women were having a loud conversation about the priest wondering together whether or not he was gay. I could see he was embarrassed. They talked about him as though he was gay.
‘What does it matter?’ I said and tried to draw the priest into the conversation where at least he would not be so objectified.
‘I think everyone is gay to some extent,’ I said.

The priest smiled but did not divulge his orientation. Secretly, I hoped he was not out rightly gay because I found myself attracted to him. I would have no hope with him. He was a priest and if he were gay as well, I would have no hope at all.

2011-03-28T19:48:00.003-04:00

I apologize to those who have sent dreams in the last few days for the delay in posting them. They will be posted tomorrow.

--Lynn Behrendt

2011-03-13T14:04:00.000-04:00

I am travelling with my family through the English countryside at night. We travel by car, crowded inside, each one squashed against the other. My younger sister joins us. She looks more weather beaten than I remember. She is an adult now in my dream and has entered into a new relationship, she tells us.

We stop to buy supplies but most of the shops are closed. The only places we can visit are small scungy cafes. They smell of cigarette smoke and the fat from deep fried fish and chips.

At one stage my sister and I leave the others to make a trip by train. I had intended to read a book on this trip but the countryside is too interesting, as are the people who occupy the stations we pass through. Everywhere it seems there are large groups of uniformed police men and women, not so much on patrol as on training courses. There is a holiday atmosphere everywhere and my sister and I relax into our journey.

I am asleep and awake at the same time in my dream, the sort of drowsy awakeness that leaves my body flaccid but my mind alert. Somehow the music from the radio station Triple JJJ rattles through my head like an earworm and the DJ drones on about the hottest one hundred. The names of the bands intrigue me. One is called ‘Nebbermine’, the others contain plays on words that I find delightful and clever.

Not only do the musicians play thumping and excellent music to my mind, they are clever and witty as well. I feel my stomach sag onto the cushion and I think to hold it in. As I do so my insides ache. I wonder whether the reason our stomachs hang out after we have eaten big meals is so that the extra size does not interfere with our digestive system, does not impact on other organs.

I slip off into another round of fitful sleep and notice the signs of the station that is our destination.

‘We’ve missed our stop, ‘ I tell my sister, who jerks up in her seat.
‘We’ll have to get off at the next station and go back.’
‘No,’ I say to her. ‘Let’s do the round again. Let’s stay asleep now.’

My sister is hesitant but she agrees. We have a ticket that allows unlimited travel for the week. We will be covered whether inspectors come on board or not. But now I cannot settle down. My sleep has been too interrupted with the talking and I wake up.

2011-03-12T06:00:00.002-05:00

I was vacationing with someone in my life whom I don't know very well; it was late at night, and we were asleep on different beds, on different sides of the room. In my dream, I awoke and attempted to look out the foggy, 30-something-th floor window of our vacation condo. We had been traveling together for days, though I do not remember where we were. Because it was humid outside, condensation had gathered, and I couldn't see out of the room. Against the opposite wall there was a television on mute. I heard this incredibly loud sound, earthquake-like. Suddenly the television caught up with what I was hearing, and I saw on the live newscast that a tall skyscraper was crumbling in slow motion -- and it was the building next to ours. I wiped the window with my forearm, but the fog wouldn't disappear. I turned back to the television, and suddenly I began to fall backwards in the room, almost foot-over-head, except that I caught the edge of a table and held on. My friend's bed began to slide, and the widows burst. I closed my eyes and felt the floor fall from underneath me. I fell for a very long time, until I fell no more.

I had no desire to open my eyes. Somewhere in the falling I realized that I was still asleep, that the memory of having woken up in the middle of the night was a continuation of the dream-state. I consciously thought how visually-interesting it would be to see the walls crumbling, my friend's face in the room with me, whatever was outside the window (having tried twice -- in vain -- to see out of it already), but I could not force any desire to actually see it. It was perhaps the most tranquil moment in a dream I've had lately (rivaling one I had about my niece four years ago), and when I awoke the second time, the time in which I'm existing now, I couldn't shake it, couldn't get back to sleep. My bedroom window is now fogged; the bedroom door is shut. And there's this simultaneous feeling of both seclusion and inclusion still in the room right now.

2011-03-11T17:20:00.000-05:00

We have arranged for Dad to stay at our favorite beachside resort in Mexico. He and I arrive by taxi; the driver says behind to get the luggage together and bring it along behind us. There is an expanse of sand dunes and scattered palm trees. I lead the way, telling Dad encouraging things—but the sand is heaped and humped, the palms frayed by wind. There has been a storm, but now it's just gusty wind. The hotel looks like a hulk, battered; staff hurry here and there making repairs. A woman meets us at the bottom of the front stairs. "Hay mucho viento," I say. "Sí," she says, leading the way. "Todo el día?" I ask. "Sí." I second-guess myself: "Yo quería decir todavía." She smiles at me kindly. Dad has not said a word; he follows along looking serene and incurious.I suddenly realize this isn't his kind of place, and with all the work going on he won't be able to get the rest he needs. The woman leave suss at the lobby desk, but ho one is there. We wander around the vast room, its walls flaking, the furniture covered in drop cloths, scaffolding for the painters everywhere but no painters. I nod toward a soaring, dirty window. "Look at that stained glass." Dad smiles and nodes. The desk clerk appears and we follow him. Dad stops by a wall that has wires curling out high up where apparel has been removed. "Maybe they could use an electrician, he says. He's serious: he would rather work on the place than just stay in it. Not his kind of thing—a vacation—even in the afterlife. He heads for the front desk to check in. I'm about to follow, but a guy about my age grabs my arm. "We're over here," he says. He is sly and jovial. I think he's a salesman. I know I've met him but can't think where. He leads me to some banquet tables set up in an L shape and covered with white table cloths. I've missed the meal, but there are still bottles with wine in them. I take a chair inside the elbow of the L. I feel trapped. Dad won't know how to find me. The guy who brought me here pours me a glass of wine. There are three or four conversations going on, none that I want to join. I drink some wine. It is a deep red, very dark and very sour.

2011-03-10T07:02:00.000-05:00

In this dream a young man of Asian descent takes careful notes as I detail symptoms of a health concern, a medical mystery of some kind, a puzzle. I’ve come to him for help in solving it. He is solemn, but deeply kind, attentive. He reminds me of many of the young men I worked with as a student advisor at the college. There seems to be some kind of understanding between us that I once helped him. Now he will help me.

As we conclude our discussion he turns to leave, but then turns back to me with one last question:

“Tell me, do you daydream often?”

Do I daydream often? A smile spreads across my face. He may as well have asked if I breathe often.

“Yes,” I say quietly, “I daydream all the time.”

“Ah!” He brightens. He likes this answer, writes it down on his clipboard of notes. He disappears down the hallway, leaving me to wonder—

Have I given him the most important symptom of my malady, the key that will unlock the mystery?

Or have I simply spoken the cure?

2011-03-08T19:44:00.002-05:00

Last night I dreamed the home invasion finally happened. Five men wearing dress suits and animal masks. Carrying rifles. They beat me with the butt ends of their rifles while I lay between the flat and fitted sheet. They took everything I owned, leaving me with an empty house. I could have called out to my husband in the next room, but I remained silent. Finally, I thought. Finally they’ve done what I’ve waited years for them to do. With this false sense of security, these possessions, I will never learn who I am.

2011-03-05T13:02:00.000-05:00

I climbed on board a bus that could have been a tram given its location along Kooyong Road. A beautiful young woman stepped up behind me and as she passed the driver remarked on her eyes. She winced as she sat down and I imagined she did not enjoy the way complete strangers threw compliments at her.
‘It could be envy,’ I said to her as she fumbled with her handbag. She looked at me bemused.

‘The way he spoke of your blue eyes. It comes across as a compliment but if it makes you miserable it might be rooted in some sort of envy, the sort your enemies direct towards you in disguise.’

‘Do you have enemies?’ I asked her.
'One out of five of my teachers perhaps,’ she said. ‘But not really.’

The tram/bus arrived at my stop unexpectedly and I had no time to finish our conversation, let alone to say goodbye. I leapt up to pull the cord and stood in the front at the door waiting for the driver to stop. But he drove on. He seemed cheerful enough and I figured that as I was now standing directly beside him he would soon see to stop, but again he drove past the next stop.
‘I have to get off,’ I said and eventually at the third stop beyond mine the driver pulled up.

I was in West Richmond now well beyond my destination, my school, and I walked back in the direction from which I had come.

I needed to cross a wide road that stretched below train tracks. It was dark and gloomy, an ideal nesting place for pigeons in its roof. A place I would not want to visit by night but in my dream it was still early morning though I worried I might be late for school. I looked down at my feet and noticed that on my black stockinged feet I wore an old pair of back patent shoes, shoes I had owned when I was in my early twenties, shoes though still serviceable that were now old fashioned. I felt embarrassed at the thought that others might consider me conservative. I would not wear these shoes the next day I resolved.

There was not much traffic as I stepped out into the middle of this road. I could not be bothered walking all the way to the traffic lights, which I saw some way in the distance and out of my way. I wove through this traffic easily but when I reached halfway, the cars that had sprinkled through slowly like Brown’s cows were now replaced by a convoy of fast paced motorbikes. The roar of the engines echoed from the underside of the metal roof tracks on the rooftop. I managed to dodge them and laughed to myself when I saw one old bike driver spit out his phlegm into the gutter. The wind blew it back up at him and it landed on his coat lapel. He almost veered off the road in an effort to wipe it off.

Serves him right, I thought. Disgusting habit. no sooner had I had this thought than a collection of bicycles streaked through followed by a number of mounted horses. The road seemed an obstacle course and I wondered would I ever get through, or would I inevitably be knocked over.

*

My youngest daughter was organising a friend’s birthday party in my dream. They had been in discussions all morning. They could not decide on a venue.

I took my bicycle out for a short ride but as I looked into the distance and could see the rolling countryside with lakes and streams ahead I fancied I might take a longer trip. The ground was wet and the roads slippery so after a time I decided to head back but not before I stopped off at a bicycle shop to check on the sturdiness of my bike.

‘You need new wheels’ the bike shop owner said to my amazement. The bicycle was new.

‘Not today,’ I said. ‘Maybe another.’

I rode off home and noticed that the parents of the girl whose party my daughter had been helping to organise had managed to lock themselves into a small building, which we called the Lodge at my old school in Richmond. The lodge consists of two tiny rooms, one on either side of a tessellated corridor that run between two ornate cast iron gates. The first leads onto the street, the other into the garden of the school. In one of these small rooms, each the size of a large bathroom, I learned Latin in my final years of school.

The parents of the girl who was about to celebrate her birthday were wealthy. They would spare no expense for their daughter’s party. I worried about the venue and was alarmed to hear when they finally escaped from the lodge that their daughter wanted to have the party in the country. We would need to drive for hours to get there and back.

My husband was unhappy about it too, but he could not object. He had no say in the matter.

Then my husband and I were driving in our car in the country, in the town of Scarborough, on holidays. We had a carload of children, our own and others, including another set of parents. We had been driving for hours when my husband pulled into the carport of a house in Scarborough, which looked unoccupied. At least it was clear at that moment that the owners were away.

‘You can’t park here,’ I said to my husband. ‘It’s not our place.’ He shook off my concerns and went inside. We proceeded to unpack. I put on a full load of washing into the washing machine and another load of socks and smalls in a drawer in the bedroom that could also be used as a washing machine. The group of us then walked through the back yard down some steps and onto the beach. The house overlooked the sea.

I looked back towards the house before we reached the beach and realised that the owners of this house had returned. They could not pull into their own carport. Our car was in the way. They would be incensed. They were.

Not one of our group wanted to step forward but I told my husband we must and he and I went up to greet the owners and to apologise.

My husband was jovial and somewhat off hand. ‘We thought the place was vacant. We meant no harm’.

I was apologetic. The male owner was a builder of sorts. He carried on his shoulder a large bag of tools. My husband tried to make small talk by admiring these tools, and the owner was half taken in, but only briefly. He wanted us gone. The owners, too, were preparing for a party, a large gathering of mainly older women for some sort of bingo night.

We went back inside and gathered our things together, including the load from the washing machine. The man’s wife looked on unimpressed and their two children, both toddlers, played around us nonplussed. We loaded up the car and told our lot to get inside when I remembered I had forgotten to take out the drawer full of the extra washing.

I had to go back inside. I collected my clothes as the owners looked on disgusted. I told them one of the cupboard drawers could serve as a washing machine. Clearly it was not something they would do.

By now their guests had arrived and they were milling around and spilling outside beside a large outdoor table. I used this table in order to gather together my still wet washing. I was looking for a bag or some form of material in which I might collect together these small items, socks, bras and knickers. I felt mortified as I bundled together my family’s wash at the table.

One of the guests, an older woman spoke to me kindly enough. She did not realise I was an interloper. I could see the owners scowling at me from the kitchen window. And so my dream ended to the ringing of the alarm.

2011-02-23T10:58:00.002-05:00

On a pedestal in the shade of the ash tree at my childhood home, a large wooden bowl has just been filled with pipe tobacco. An old uncle happens by. Delighted, he fills his pipe, lights it, and draws on it with great contentment. Then he departs, disappearing into the atmosphere, which seems to be made more of memory than it is of air. I find a pipe in my hands, the one I keep on my desk that belonged to my father’s brother before he was killed in the second world war. But when I go to fill it, the wooden bowl on the pedestal contains damp, mostly decayed ash leaves. And so I clear the bowl with my hands. Soon thereafter, it’s filled with tobacco again, how or by whom, I don’t know. I’m joined then by a friend I haven’t seen since my father’s funeral in 1995. He sees my pipe and says my uncle’s name. I fill it, light it in his presence, and inhale. “Ghost notes,” is my reply.

2011-02-23T10:08:00.001-05:00

it's 5 pm & I'm sitting at a cocktail table at a train station. I walk to the counter. the clerk has bleachd-blond hair but the stubble on his chin is dark. I ask him if the 5:45 westbound is on time. he says it's ahead of schedule. so ahead of schedule that there no longer is time for my complimentary mini-massage. as I walk back to my table I see my cousin Regina in front of a mirror. she's removing makeup & crying. when I return to the table I spread out newspaper clippings my mother sent me. hidden in the clippings is a twenty dollar bill.

the sound of a real train wakes me.

2011-02-17T15:47:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed it was snowing again thick blankets of it and a woman was floating around my house in a orange caftan an intruder and I dreamed I jumped out of bed to wash my hands and the soap turned into chocolate chip cookie dough and I felt dirty.

2011-02-14T07:00:00.003-05:00

Last night oh god I dreamed I was Henry watching from the outside a very very exclusive and expensive boys' school. All the boys were dressed in white satin in the manner of the 18th century courts and they sat in a row of white chairs holding white violins with the strings outward (Henry never play violin as far as I know but there is a bass violin in one of his paintings) and the boys' left hands were draped casually over the top of the violins' scrolls and they slouched in their finery and laughed among themselves and teased one another in the manner of the wealthy and spoilt. When their teacher sounded a tuning fork several of the boys' heads came right off and went zooming around the room and the rest of the students got quiet. I was writing everything down as Henry. Alone and watching trying not to get caught.

2011-02-13T07:00:00.002-05:00

I had a scary dream last night that I was walking across a kind of ice field while talking to my mom on the phone. Then I could feel and hear the ice begin to crack and shift, and I got sucked down into the swirling, freezing water underneath. I was still holding the phone, but I was stunned, or the wind knocked out of me, and I couldn't speak to tell her what was happening. I lost my grip on the phone, and the current pulled me farther and farther away from it. I was less upset about the possibility of drowning than about losing my phone--that is, having no way to reach her.

2011-02-12T18:14:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed of blankets of snow falling thick and white and silent and other little weirdnesses trying to get in trying to make their way into my brain. Our room is high up and I refuse to shut the curtains because I love the sound of the city and so and so I freeze. Yesterday three of the four terminals at O'Hare lost power completely and no one knows why.

2011-02-11T07:00:00.001-05:00

I dreamed of a series of industrial freezers, the size of shipping containers, in which there were racks of seafood, scallops, prawns, crayfish and salmon. I was free to select from an assortment of these treats for the barbeque.

I had started to cook the scallops, fast over a high hot flame when I realised that others might prefer a whole fish – a whole fish, which I might bake on top of the hot plate one side at a time.

My mother had died not long before I had started cooking and someone came to me and offered a piece of her for the BBQ. I was revolted by the thought, but no, this person insisted, it is not unconventional to prepare a part of the dead person for consumption. She arrived soon after with what looked like a trussed fish but was actually my mother’s arm.

I wince even now as I remember the sensation and the thought of not only cooking but eating my mother. I could not do it.

2011-02-10T07:00:00.004-05:00

acrobat/green bra/lacerated tongue

Dream I am a little girl and I’m a gymnast/ acrobat. My father is my trainer or we have a father/daughter act. The father in the dream is not like my actual father, nor is the mother like my actual mother. I am being prepared for some kind of competition. Also I think my mother is a dentist. She is referring people to an oral surgeon. I think the oral surgeon is also my dream father. She brings him a beer, and he has a fit, because it’s the kind from a can and not from a bottle. So she refers a patient to another oral surgeon. For some reason I am talking to that surgeon. The patient has had a hard time eating food and enjoying it. I said, is it because he bit his tongue and he has lacerations? And the surgeon says, yes, exactly, how do you know? And I say, oh, because I have experienced that, and I show him my lacerated tongue. Showtime is approaching and I need a costume. I guess I am old enough to need a bra because I am trying on bras. One was emerald green satin with ribbons… but I need a whole ensemble… and there is a bit of an issue because I invert, so I need something that will not be too revealing when I do so… I suggest black lace shorts…. I must have figured out something because showtime comes… it’s in a playground…. I was so worried about the routine, we’d gone over it so many times… and I think I accomplish it but to be honest I had a very troubled sleep last night and I am not really sure, my jaw so clenched, and up between 3:30 and 4:30, drugs notwithstanding.

2011-02-09T07:00:00.000-05:00

Flood

I visit some place deep in rural Japan and decide to live there… Alli Warren too is there… I move from my apartment here in Brookyn to there because one day I take a walk in that village and there is snow but there are also jonquils… and in a tree.. something I think is first a snake and then a tiger but ir turns out to be som kind of giant SKINK

but with markings like a tiger or spotted horse… it is all so unbelievably magical, the beauty of the nature around me, that I feel I have to live there

anyway… it seems that I and Alli have married farmers… we have married these simple and crude farmer guys of the countryside I have sold my apartment and moved into this other apartment. I have gone through my clothes and moved from Tokyo or New York or wherever I was. many of the clothes I have to sell and get rid of because they no longer fit me, I’ve become so thin and anyway I don’t need them in the coutryside

and… I go back to my classrooms in Tokyo or New York or wherever I teach… I have these huge classes there… and I tell them I am moving to the countryside… I talk to Nancy about it she says yeah I almost moved there at one point….

I say it is so beautiful there… and I have come to the place in my life where I need a change

and I hitch a ride back to the country side with some people I don’t know… and it’s weird… I ask if we’re going north… but I can feel we are driving south… and they say yes… but it must have been another road, one I don’t recognize, because we go through a kind of neon Chinatown las vegas kind of place and I say, oh this isn’t right… and somehow I get back to the village… where there is a little pub… something about a little pub… anyway I am in this new apartment… I guess with my farmer husband? at parts of the ream I am single other times not… anyway… I notice that when I look out the window… which is oddly shaped… that I see these sort of snowy muddy dots… not the sky… and I hear a rushing sound… and it seems that there is a giant flood… pulling me along… rushing… and I notice… that I am not in my apartment any longer but in a boat…. and I am there with my husband… and I we have never had sex before but we have sex for the first time, I guess because I am so grateful to him for saving my life.... he must have carried me up from the apartment to the boat...

and also it seems we have two kids

and Alli in a parallel situation has two kids, or maybe three… and it turns out we are in this flood, this flood, see, and when we are saved we are in someplace urban. It is a combination of NY and SF… but the thing is that now we have these bumpkin husbands and all these children to support… there are these giant documents on brown cardboard paper bound with huge magenta staples… listing all of our duties as rural wives… and there are scenes of me with I guess my mother or grandmother in laws going over the rules… there are piles of vegetables in plastic colanders… traditional ways to prepare things… and they are teaching me

and there are manuals about how to behave… rules… like, even though in extreme poverty do not steal the soap from public restrooms (I remember thinking about the varieties of scented soaps available here in the urban US)… OK so but then I realize that I had fallen asleep in the apartment and not the boat, and my bumpkin husband had saved me… I weep and weep

For some reason I am also supposed to start graduate school and I am preparing to do that…Maybe Alli too. We are town.. now we are out of the countryside and about to go to school, what do we do with the husbands? the children? The feelings are riotously mixed. I am so grateful at having been saved. But I want to be free. There is a huge public hearing in a kind of basement space. All the local citizens are brought in…I guess this is back in the countryside.. and the huge books with magenta staples are brought in…

and it was about at this time I became fully aware that this dilemma was not a real one but only one I was so overwhelmingly dreaming.

2011-02-08T07:00:00.002-05:00

I was offered a choice between two bright-red plastic harmonicas. I said I’d start with the small one, which was about eight inches long. The other measured about two feet. I started to play, and soon my coat grew tails as I smacked my right foot on the sidewalk, noticing the flecks of star-like grit as I did so and almost slipping into the gutter. A crowd gathered. I had no idea what I was playing or where it would lead, but suddenly finding myself in need of a spectacular high note, I had to use the ringing in my right ear — the ringing in my left being an octave lower — and when the people heard it — I could feel its forceful exit as of a great wind rushing through my head — they broke into applause.

2011-02-07T07:00:00.005-05:00

dream: "escape"

I was in "Paris" although it didn't look like Paris
I had to take a train
to get to the cineplex
which was one of the only things
to do there
so it really wasn't Paris
and it was actually a kind of
exploratorium
or museum of the moving image
and there was one "exhibit"
that would put you in the movie
in some marvelous computer-generated way
and I couldn't at first see what the results were
but I did it again and then I could
there were war films, and science fiction,
and fantasy
and art movies and porn, and walking
in golden gate park
or some park that looked like it
but the amazing thing about this
technology was that the resulting film moved
in several "strips" from right to left
and also vertically
SIMULTANEOUSLY
and sometimes it would replace all of
a person or object with me
and sometimes just a part
so sometimes I'd be
flying through the air
and sometimes it would be another woman's
breast in place of my breast

and at one point I was back here in NY and
Bradley showed the film
and now suddenly I remember Gary was there too
I guess we were still together? but in the film
I had had an "affair" that was not just computer-
generated but real? I don't know it was one of those
dreams that kept repeating elements
I think.

I think also there was another exhibit of a similarly
non linear and disorienting film
although I can't remember how it worked exactly
it was a little like those "choose your narrative" stories,
I guess video games are like that but I don't know
since I've never played a video game.

the exhibit/movie was in a circular room and there were white wires with buttons
and I would push buttons to make another scene happen in the movie
or was it in experience? I don't remember if I was in this movie or not
maybe I was? maybe this was the one with the "affair"? there maybe was talk
of this movie having been "directed by one of two famous directors: one
was Cassavettes but I can't remember the other one.

but it is interesting especially because I had just been talking
in real life yesterday to my Thai student Nham, who is a filmmaker,
and super-cool, about how movies maybe started out trying to represent
our perceptions and have ended up reorganizing them. I realize
this is not a very sophisticated observation

but a dream is kind of a movie, right? and that there was a movie inside
the dream, and then that the movie was later "shown" to an audience,
to me extremely intricate.

2011-02-06T07:00:00.003-05:00

"Bill's Backyard, Bolinas"

by Tom Clark

Now light streams through the trees of the dream.

Dead friends idly amble through the arches

The green bower makes over our heads;

In Bill's backyard -- framed for this flashback

To the days before, or perhaps during, the Flood --

Things are, as in a kind of moonlit masque

Lit up at night like the carnival scene

In Strangers on a Train; yet strangers

There are none, only friends; summer fog coming in

On the marine layer clockwork shuttle

Over the populous village in the dream;

Sea, hill, wood, numberless goings on;

Off in the distance beyond Elm somewhere,

Off beyond Ocean Parkway in the mists,

A whistle buoy intermittent; blue reedy

Spiritual openness of Eric

Dolphy floating from inside the humble shack

Taking shape as words, a cool

Geometrical language; then cloudy faces

Tossed up on the cresting waves

Beyond the reef, in the dream: ghosts

Waving, not drowning. So let's make this stroll

Through the underworld last.

2011-02-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed I was living in an apartment attached to a restaurant. I walked out on the terrace of the apartment and outside was a long reflection pool kind of like the one at the Washington Monument only shorter and in it up close were two baby orca whales and they were swimming back and forth rubbing their bodies against each other and I told the owner of the apartment and she said she had to get rid of them and I went out onto the terrace again and there were two huge boulders and on each boulder was a giant pulsing pink octopus and I told the owner again about them and the third time I went out to the terrace someone had thrown a black and white live cow into the pool and the whales were feeding on it eating chunks from its side. I ran in to find the apartment owner but she wasn't around so I ran back outside to find her putting two bird cages in the pool and in each cage was a cat and she was pushing them out into the middle of the pool so I jumped in and rescued them.

Before I went to bed my cell phone rang and the little screen read AT&T Billing and I thought maybe I owned them money so I answered and it was my mother. I don't know how she got my number. I gave it to the hospital when she was there so maybe they gave it to her. I don't relish the idea of her having it but at least I know not to answer when the weird AT&T thing is on the little screen. I am positive it was my mother in the dream.

2011-02-04T16:56:00.000-05:00

I was with my father and late maternal grandfather at an antique gun show in the parking lot of Eastern Michigan University. A Goodyear blimp like a giant hermit-crab croissant hovered high overhead. My father and grandfather toted their acquisitions toward an embankment surrounding the lot; I followed empty handed. (I haven't fired a gun since my teens.) My father uncharacteristically aimed his new old rifle at the blimp and fired. Characteristically, he missed; even more characteristically, he accepted failure with good-natured equanimity and turned to proceed on his way. My grandfather then seized his opportunity to display superior marksmanship. He took aim, fired, and missed. Unlike my father, however, he was unwilling to concede that the target was beyond his range. He took more careful aim and fired again, this time hitting a glass panel of the blimp. I heard a faint tinkle and saw tiny shards falling. My grandfather chuckled his bad-boy chuckle, and we all turned and started up the embankment.

Suddenly I heard a horrific crash behind me. Like the opera-house chandelier in The Phantom of the Opera, the blimp had fallen on the rifle show, crushing countless people! The wrecked blimp gushed a pool of gas that spread with preternatural speed. I tried to run up the embankment after my father and grandfather, who'd disappeared; but I stumbled and fell, and the gas got me.

2011-01-31T08:02:00.000-05:00

I'm packed into a murmuring crowd of people somewhere, perhaps a bar queue. Someone cops a lingering feel/grope of my ass. It is an arousing experience. I turn to find myself alone in a cavernous room, staring at my reflection in a mirror.

2011-01-28T07:23:00.000-05:00

22 January 2011

In my dream I am lying in bed in a huge and sprawling house of many floors and many rooms, with wide gardens beyond. From here I can see throughout the house as if I am walking through these rooms in a movie. It is my family home and yet I am also a visitor.

My father is drunk. I know this without seeing him or hearing a sound. I know he is drunk and I am fearful that he might discover me alone in my bed. In flash I decide to hide, under the bed under a blanket, squeezed up tight like a ball. But the bed is narrow, a single bed, and it stands out in the middle of the room.

My father when he arrives, as I knew he must, is able to poke around underneath the bed and find me there without any effort at all. It is impossible for me to hide. My father crawls under the bed and sprawls out on top of me, a suffocating dead weight.

‘Where is my mother,’ I say? ‘Where are the others, my sisters and brothers?’

He does not answer but breathes alcohol soaked fumes all over my face. His smell revolts me and his weight crushes down on me, but I can do nothing.

I cannot get out from underneath him.

Dream 28 January 2011

To use the toilet you needed a key. The lid was otherwise locked. I knew the right person to ask and managed to get hold of one. Into the toilet I delivered a lump of flesh like substance, rather like the after-birth but without a blood supply, pale pink and jellied with strips of white fat. I wondered at its size, amazed that I could lose so much without even noticing its passing until I had looked down and saw it there in the toilet bowl.

I asked a friend about it as we walked along a Collins Street type boulevard. She was nonplussed, so I decided I must be, too. But still it troubled me.

Then I was in the dentist’s waiting room with my husband. The dentist arrived but told us that given he was now 77 years old he must retire. He offered the name of an alternative dentist in Blackburn.
‘Must we travel so far? I asked.
The dentist did not welcome objections. He had noticed the list of names of friends, family and colleagues and proceeded to discuss our telephone list with my husband. We kept the list on the bench near the telephone.
‘We know so many people in common,’ the dentist said. He scrolled down the list with his index finger.

I worried he might discover his own sister E’s name towards the end of the list. E was my old boss from so many years ago, now dead, but in my dream she was still alive.

E appeared to me then and I made a point of showing her my written description of her work on my referral list where I had talked about her as a good practitioner, but this was not how I actually saw her.

2011-01-16T10:38:00.000-05:00

Evil as he was, I thanked him, knowing full well we would still have to contend with his vicious dogs before we reached the gate. I opened the front door and he watched us go, sitting on his throne. It was an antiseptic room. He had no hair. His skin was smooth. The dogs sniffed the ground. They began to growl. I addressed the most menacing one: “Nice puppy,” and he smiled as we eyed the gate. Another: “Hello, puppy,” with the same result. But the third made an awful sound deep in its throat. I whispered to my wife that we should continue to move ahead as slowly as we could — one sudden move, I said, and the dog would spring. All the while, I waited for him to bite my leg, wondering what it would feel like when his teeth penetrated the cloth and met the bone. But all he did was growl. The man — where had I seen him before? With my son, it was, after we’d escaped an empty factory with grain on the floor. I’d wrestled a rusted grate from its hinges and we crawled through a narrow chute until we came to a river. The water was low. We could have crossed it by stepping on the exposed rocks scattered everywhere. We came to a bend, then turned around. Where the chute had been was now a wild narrow canyon. “Flash flood,” I said. And we heard the sound.

2011-01-15T03:00:00.002-05:00

Prologue and Dream
My sister and I are in the middle of an unbelievable fiasco/nightmare
– our recently deceased mother’s car was towed – the car that we’ve
been using to go back & forth from the city to where my mother lived,
to empty out the apt. (and her cremated remains are in a box in the
trunk). We were trying to leave the city for her place last nite, so
my sister went to the parking space: no car, so she called the city
towing place, closed til this a.m., & why was the car towed? The space
was good til today. But, outstanding unpaid tickets from the
summertime, when my mother was going into and coming out of the
hospital, that my sister (J) was fighting (w/no response from the
city). So J goes down to the marshall's office this morning, they ask
to see her license -- it's missing from where it always is in her
wallet, so she calls me at her apt. and I search around a little, but
my sister is a hoarder. This is a small 1 bdrm apt. with clothing,
papers, bags of papers, legal papers, stacks of this 'n' that -- I
have no idea where my underwear or socks are 'cuz there's no place to
put my stuff, it gets moved or covered by the day's debris, etc. etc.
so I wash each out every nite to put it on the next day. But back to
the license.
I don't find it -- I dump out her bag, but I don't see it. Then I go
back to "bed" (the floor) & fall into an amazing major motion picture
of a dream, about the lost license, I can see the photo of my sister
with short hair and dark lipstick, about my feelings towards my mother
& her death, about items & objects & all sorts of people and then
there's even a spider that's off-white & kind of reptilian that digs
its claws(!) into my hand & I run out to an alley screaming with pain
so some guy picks it off my hand w/great effort and there are sort of
venomous stalagmites (tites?) -- 5 of them, rising painfully from the
palm of my hand and J's in the dream & I'm rifling through her bag,
emptying it, looking for her license so we can take the car already &
get out of this place ... & that's the half of it. There are rows of
people sitting on benches or clustered in small groups talking or
watching whatever personal dramas are suddenly played out. Two friends
from London are sitting in a corner and they suddenly see me after
nearly a year since they moved and they're so surprised that I’m
there. Where is “there”? It’s a waiting room. There are big plate
glass windows that barely separate inside from outside. The images
slide away. There’s more, but as I write, I forget.

2011-01-14T03:00:00.002-05:00

The "fidelity" of the dream is unusual, beginning like a Byzantine painting, slightly animated. The Emperor of Italy is holding court. The Emperor of Italy is Mussolini and the court is being given a presentation by two Futurists, one of whom is the Emperor's cousin, "Mussolini." The two Futurists give a presentation of their manifesto, which begins as speech but "degenerates" into a mixture of sound poetry and popular music. The Emperor, who was initially excited about the performance becomes offended and declares it unsuitable. The children of the court at this point become enthralled with the Futurists and counter-protest, rushing past the Emperor to get closer to the Futurists. A "Sheriff-of-Nottingham"-type figure emerges (the fidelity of the dream now more "Saturday morning cartoon"), holding a sign that says "Respect Representation" and slowly begins spinning the sign around. The sign spinning becomes an enlarged phonographic record, and moments later, a compact disc, but ruby in color and three-or more- dimensions. The figure warns of what will come next if the sign continues spinning.

2011-01-13T18:39:00.000-05:00

The tram was about to take off but it hesitated for a final customer, a young man who must have appeared in the driver’s rear vision mirror. This gave me enough time to catch up. I tapped on the glass door, which had already closed, to let me in. The door opened and I proceeded to drag myself on board. My bags were heavy; all three of them and my legs felt leaden after my sprint to the tram stop. I could not make myself climb the three steps and I feared the doors would close again before I had the chance to get in. I heaved myself upwards, with every effort of my will.
‘Get on,’ another young man said. He had just arrived behind me and was keen that the tram should not go without him.
‘Push me in,’ I said. ‘Just push’. I did not care how it looked. I needed to get onto the tram. I needed to get to the airport. I needed to get a flight home because later that afternoon I planned to travel yet again and this time overseas.

In my dream I had visited Varuna, the Writer’s House in the Blue Mountains. I had stayed there for a few days, long enough to visit the physiotherapist in Katoomba for my knee, and long enough to make arrangements with a barrister to deal with a legal dispute hanging over my head. Long enough to deal with the plumber. They were all there in the Writer’s House in the Blue Mountains where I had been staying, even though the work they were embarking upon involved activities in Melbourne, my home.

At one stage I stood in the workshop of one of my husband’s acquaintances and although I had left my husband at home in Melbourne, here he was beside me in the workshop in the Blue Mountains admiring the man’s machinery and tools. The man had collected years of bric-a-brac around his workshop. The shelves were full of porcelain figurines and children’s mechanical toys that beeped and wheeled when you pressed their buttons. Toys from Japan, figurines from other lands and high up on the walls hanging on a hook, an old potty or pissoir as it might once have been called.
‘Those are valuable,’ I said to man.
‘How valuable?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They might fetch about $70.00.’ Even as I said this I realise $70.00 is not a great deal of money, especially as we were concerned about many thousands of dollars debt. And more bills to come with the plumber and the barrister.
I went to visit Jim Murdoch a fellow blogger who in my dream took the place of Peter Bishop from Varuna. We chatted amiably until loud voices interrupted us. A large group of mature age students crammed into Jim’s back yard where he and I had been talking.
They had come for their lesson. I had hoped to talk longer and more meaningfully but we had no time now, so I patted Jim on the arm and took my leave.
As I walked up the hill to the main street in Katoomba across the grassy slope of a hill I noticed in its centre what looked to be a sheet of glass, which was in fact a deep pool of water that had formed overnight in the rain.
I was not the only one amazed at this collection of water, which had seemingly developed out of nowhere overnight. I thought of the floods elsewhere and hurried on. At the main road I saw my tram and ran to catch it.

2011-01-11T03:00:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamed it was night and there was a knock at my front door and it was a skinny man dressed like Santa sort of with suspenders and a fedora and he handed me a tiny piece of paper like a fortune cookie fortune and asked if I was Rebecca and I said who are you and he said he was a bill collector so I slammed the door in his face. When I turned around I noticed my Christmas tree was full of burnt old frying pans and I knew my mother had shoved them in there. And damn now I can't remember the rest of the dream.

2011-01-10T03:00:00.002-05:00

Winter
I am sitting next to a friend, showing her texts from my boyfriend, who is far away. He is making words with his cell phone, sending them, they don't make sense. We're laughing, there's a picture, it's great.

Spring
We're all together, some of us, at a show in Brooklyn. I am buzzed and feel small on a big leather sofa. I am not thinking, just listening to the happy busy sounds of friends deep in excited conversation. Music. Processors/samplers/projects/everything, everything. I don't remember which band it was, just being there.

Summer
I am in a cornfield in Indiana deep into night. Up from corn sprouts wind turbines, above them stars, below them fireflies. The night is full of insect song and I fall in love with everything.

Fall
In Marin the grapevines are pinned with these sparkling sheets of paper. The hills roll golden and shining. Modest Mouse is on the stereo, on us through fog into city unreal and bending.

Winter
We light fires on the porch, wait for something to happen. It does.