Dreamovie 58

I am unable to sleep well, and my dream intersects with my waking world. Some birdsong I do not recognize is sounding outside my window. The song is reverberating against this cold wet spring morning and repetitive. I try to recall the song. In my dream, I try to take notes on the song. I imagine I am writing these in bed. First, I have a notepad by my bedside and I write in that, but I realize that I do not have such a pad. So I am lying flat on my back, still asleep, but in my dream, still flat on my back, I am typing my notes into a computer. As I go through my dream, I find more experiences that require me to take notes. After taking dozens of notes, I realize I am dreaming that I do not have my laptop in the bed with me, that I haven't taken any notes at all, and that I'll need to remember these events on my own. I cannot wake myself up to take the notes, so I dream through them.

While trying to remember these notes, I am walking behind my family's house in Tennessee, but it it not in Tennessee nor is it that same house. The backyard is huge, fenced in, dotted with trees, and it slopes gently downward. I walk through that space trying to remember everything I see, trying to take notes in my head as I walk around bushes and avoid trees. Beyond the end of the yard is another large house. I walk up a sudden rise and into that house.

Many people live in that house, and a gathering of some kind is taking place. I am looking for something there, though I cannot recall what. I leave a group of people chatting in the kitchen to find what I am looking for. I find Ray in a bedroom preparing for a trip to Europe. His room is large and neat but filled with knickknacks. The walls of the room are burdened with posters and various plastic trinkets and figurines. As he finishes his packing, we talk. Some mild joke I release into the air gets Ray quite upset. I am surprised by this because I meant no harm at all.

Ray walks outside during our continuing conversation, dragging his rolling suitcase. I follow him and am surprised to find that, by leaving through the other side of the house, we are on a city street. The side I entered on was suburban at best and actually fairly rural. As we walk down the street, I calmly explain that I had no intentions of hurting Ray, and he finally relents and accepts my apology, expressing surprise that I have acted so calmly when he has reacted so emotionally to me.

I am in the basement of the house Ray shares. I am with two other people, colleagues of mine, and we apparently live in that room together. We are planning to go to a conference on the work of bpNichol, and the woman says she needs a bedroom of her own beforehand. I find this a reasonable request and discover that there is a little empty antechamber to Ray's bedroom. I suggest that this will make a good bedroom for her. All I have to do is approve this use of the room with the woman in charge of the house, but as I go to speak to the woman I realize that I am not trying to justify a separate bedroom at a conference but a separate bedroom in the house, and that is a much more difficult justification to make in this culture. I know I will be asked why this woman needs a room of her own.

Somewhere in this house there is a doctor, who sometimes performs surgery on the inhabitants of the house. She finishes with a woman I know, and then it is my turn for surgery. I do not trust her, and I've made that clear during her surgery on my friend. I am lying down, waiting for the surgery to begin. The surgeon carefully unwraps her instruments, which include (for some reason) a flat double-edged razor blade and various needles and pins, as well as scissors, scalpels, and the other expected tools of her trade. I decide I do not want her to conduct surgery on me and I am just about to sit up (I am not anesthetized) when the woman scoops up all of her tools and throws them down onto my face.

I immediately begin pulling the objects out of my cheeks, my forehead, my eyes, even my tongue. The woman becomes disturbed by what she has done and wants to help me, but I tell her to stay away from me. I am bent over, facing the ground, and dropping sharp little bits of metal to the floor. My friend, who has never left the room, is still with me, and she explains, she already knows, that I am blind in my right eye.

In my dream I was hypergraphia hypergraphia hypergraphia--wrote long pythons / nylons. I would write for 24 hours as an experiment that paraded as a joke.

All of the books on my bookshelf were empty. Blank pages fluttering like birds.

You walk into an elevator and exit
completely different.

You erase R erased.

Fairfield Inn, Room 220, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

I dreamed I had created the most resonant of praecisio poems, a poem that said everything that could be said about nothingness and was simultaneously unsettling and revitalizing, incandescent. Now that I am awake, I know nothing more of the outlines of the poem, so all I can do is accept what I believed in my restful sleep and remember that I am the creator of that poem and that, in some way, I am the creator of nothingness, the ultimate goal of any creator: to make something so overwhelming that it changes the core of reality. I am a creator, so I dream, sometimes in Schenectady, sometimes in Baton Rouge, sometimes in Englewood, sometimes in Chautauqua, moving, moving, ever searching for that one scrap of one of my creations to fit back into the hole my mind conjured in the hazy fabric of the universe.

There were dead children throughout my dream. A grand party at my brother’s house interstate or was it my friend Ann’s, because they were Ann’s children. She had sixteen of them and slowly one after the other they fell ill. But no one called the doctor. Instead the children lay down on the kitchen floor and people walked beside them, stepped over them as though they were bits of furniture and the children’s skin lost it’s pinkness and turned to a sickly grey colour and soon enough their chests stopped heaving with the effort to breathe and they were dead. We knew they were dead but no one grieved or shed a tear. No one commented on the sadness of it all, the party continued and other children played on around the two dead ones. People ate and drank. I was upset because I sensed there was no room for me. The place was so crowded with friends of my brother’s children. They came in droves. They took liberties in my brother’s house. They borrowed his expensive cars without asking him and there was nowhere that I could settle down. I wanted to watch a movie of some tourist island that I had down loaded into a special mechanism on my neck, a holiday island. Maybe that’s what I’m desperate for some holiday place away from all this rancour. I long for it.

I go into a steam room (the steam part is off) -- fully dressed, mind you. Three male poets of differing Asian descent are there. We take turns reading from Nick Carbo's book, Secret Asian Man. One of them starts feeling dizzy. I tell him he's getting hives on his face. We leave the room for air.

like last night i'm having an erotic dream about a girl i'm not particularly attracted to in real life when out of nowhere a monstrous scabby dreadlocked "lady" emerges from the bushes outside my parent's house and just stares at me. this is incredibly scary. she looks a little like the weird homeless lady-thing from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

i woke up, checked my room for anything weird, made sure humanoid shapes were just "shapes"...but still couldn't get back to sleep.

I'm delivering a package on behalf of Lynn Behrendt to either my Pilates studio or my old gym. I go to the Pilates studio first. I pass a soldier on the way who is looking for the package, it's his job to get it, but he doesn't bother with me or try to take it. I walk back home, realize I forgot to do something, and walk back, this time crawling past the soldier -- he pays me no mind. I go into my old gym and a woman who works there greets me, says certain trainers miss me or want to work with me. I don't remember most of them, but pretend I do. She enourages me to attend special sessions over the weekend, but I tell her I'm going to be out-of-town. She says X (another poet, will remain nameless else he may self-google and get an inflated ego) will be teaching a self-defense class on Sunday at 3:00. I ask if he's coming all the way down to VA just to do that. Then I remember that he's doing something at the Pilates studio at that time -- and tell her of the potential scheduling conflict.

I walk out -- going a different way that takes me right past the soldier who is sitting on the desk outside the parking lot. He has to be aware that I have information about the package, but again he pays me no mind and is speaking to someone on the phone about it. A man walks by me and I hear him saying that there was something very dangerous in that package. I don't know what was in it, but I doubt what he's saying. I try to imagine what might be in it, I think maybe wine, but realize the package wasn't heavy enough. I consider warning Lynn or the people I delivered it to, but don't.