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Everyone was dressing to go to something for a writer who was very sick and either did or did not know it.  I kept telling all the writers, poem and prose writers, that her writing was like a big negative thing that sucked people into it. I was screaming this. Some people didn’t like me because I said this. I offered to take anyone who wanted to the service for the writer who was oblivious that it was a service for her. There was a mother and daughter who were very large and the daughter decided to ride with me in the open car. Air was very important. I could see that parts of her body stuck out and showed beneath her clothes. She wore a long black skirt that gathered at her waist and still I could see one of her bones.

I was wearing many different patterns and finally took one off in the form of a scarf. I felt more all together after that removal. We walked up and over the hill past the people at tables and through the gate that was on the street side. The fence down low was like a picket fence, only more colorful. Once we got through, that left us on the outside of a rail fence that still had bark on it and had the natural shape of tree branches. We finally got to the car and it was red. The poet who didn’t like that I talked about the sick girl’s negativity squinted slightly when he saw me, to avoid me. That was the last I saw of him.

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.

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.

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.

 

In my dream we had decided to purchase a house in a rough neighborhood, although it made no sense. We took a down payment and went to find the owner. She gladly took the money and had all her family move out immediately. My daughter and I started walking from the front entrance to the back rooms of the house. There seemed to be a long hall with rooms off of it, and was mostly a place to sleep with lots of beds. When we got to the last two rooms on the first floor, we found two families still in bed. Evidently the woman who sold us the house had been renting out these two rooms and had not warned the tenants that the house was going to be sold. We told them that we would work with them until they found someplace else to rent. They seemed relieved but still upset that they would have to find other quarters. Then we climbed to the second floor and found a very large gymnasium that was being used by a school that was situated across the street. All the boys had on white uniforms. The gym was much longer than a basketball court. The coaches were surprised to hear about the sale. We walked towards the front and found that the wooden floor would move as if the whole structure was a large boat in dry-dock, without any supports. My daughter and I moved the ship from side to side, made it rock. Then we finally found a room at the front of the house that had a fireplace that was roaring. The room had leather chairs for lounging. There was one more family renting a room upstairs who had to be advised that they would have to find another home. Like the others, the whole family had cell phones and started using them to communicate their dilemma to friends and family.

So I’m discussing changes to the description of a class, simplifying it, not demanding so much of the students. The registrar agrees and is saving me a space for the new description and title. There must be some field or something that I have to get across. There always is. Then there’s the question of who needs to be on the beach—I or my mother. That’s part of it—the mother has to sit on the beach and wait. It gives her an excuse to be there. I think it’s me, waiting for my daughter.

Then I am trying to restore the back of a building. It seems to need painting. Is what I have painted good or not? Who is in charge? There are words on the walls, but the question is not what they say, but how do they look. Inside the rooms are full of things I don’t care about, and I’m trying to get the kids to understand that can’t let just anyone in, into the bathroom. Everywhere I turn there are flounces and trim, things I don’t like or need.

I am busy trying to get rid of someone who is being kicked out, kicked off the team. The color green is a marker, trying to keep it in mind. Tension remains in my upper arms and neck. I am getting help to get rid of someone, thinking I am someone else. How do I know? Living under the roof like a refugee, they will clear out Costa’s stuff. I read “inlaid” when the word was undone. I broke the sentence off, knowing how it might continue.

There was a large map on a table. We were adding water to it with a kind of spongy roller device. Someone showed us a specific area to make sopping wet. Then someone whose origin was that area came by and we showed her that her area was really wet. At first she didn’t get it, but we knew eventually she’d be upset. There was a wild man with little black legs and a handlebar moustache who showed up like a crazy revolutionary. It was if his legs were singed. I forgot to call Paul on the Epiphany. Then someone in my dream complains.

Later in a new dream there is a storage unit that has a way to remove something from it because there is a blue light inside it. The blue light is key. I am not worried that my dreams slip away, I no longer feel worried and I sense that I am no longer searching and anxious about it. The search is mild. The blue light keeps shining.

After Reading Seduction of the Minotaur

I met a woman who was French and young. We met in a second hand clothing store. She was trying on a plaid jacket that I had just brought in to the store a short time before. The store was going to sell it for much more than I thought they would or than it was worth. She told a friend in French that she would buy the jacket and then bring it back, complaining that this and that was wrong with it, and that way she would get part of her money back. I seemed to understand what she was saying in French and tried to say something to her, also in French. She corrected my French saying that my verb was an old-fashioned way of saying something, no longer in use. I tried to say what she was saying to me—to repeat the French phrase after her with the correct accent. Since however my French was not expert, I had no way of knowing if what she was saying to me was correct in the first place.

Then the two of us walked around the store for a long time. In the course of those few hours I met two different men who were her husbands. One was young and black and held a child on his shoulders. The other was heavy-set, dressed casually and much older. He seemed to have a secret of some sort, because they made signals to each other about what they were doing. Finally the young woman suggested that we make an appointment to meet at another time. She said that since this meeting had gone on for so long it must have been an indication that we were compatible. Finally, we ended up sitting in a corner on a wooden bench, spending even more time talking, but I don’t know in what language. Then as we sat there we watched a guy put oil on his body and attach little silver candy balls all over him in neat rows, those little silver balls that can decorate cakes. We were above him and could see him from our bench. Then quite unexpectedly he was able to eat part of his arm without hurting himself. We could see his left-over arm, kind of jagged.

My son and I were watching what appeared to be a very large black TV screen. On it they were diagramming a new NASA project, a space station for actors. We watched as the house where the actors would live out in space, glided inside another glass structure that was something like a glass box. The house and the box were both made entirely of glass. I commented to my son that the glass was for the sake of a 360 degree view in outer space.

Then we were standing outside the glass house, waiting for a tour. Another person came up to join us for the tour. Quite suddenly he was inside and we were still outside. We knocked on the glass wall saying—you forgot us. The NASA scientist said he couldn't let us in. I screamed back at him, at the top of my lungs—and what are we, chopped liver?

On a school campus on the edge of a sidewalk I find a baby that at first looks like a doll. His neck is very extended and it appears to be decaying. I push the head down closer to the shoulders and this seems to help.

Later I am in the office where I usually work at my usual desk. Then I realize that my boss has left for good and so I move to his old desk and take my phone and all its cords and messages with me. To the side of his desk are many brown bags of his projects along with bags of trash. It is hard to tell which is which. I have a good laugh with the woman who is taking my desk when I finally get why she was sitting beside me. We start laughing in relief that we don’t have to work at the same desk that is way too small for two people.

Then at some point there is a girl in a blue sweater who comes running in to report that a student is causing problems by trying to lure snakes onto a blanket on the grass. The girl is hysterical and has a pockmarked face. It occurs to me that we can’t help her.

SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT

I’m keeping a notebook on the bed beside me. I dream about it and it is the pressure I need to jot down my dreams. What actually happens is that each time I think I’m waking up, I review my dream to that point, over and over again. It begins with a group of us are going to Santorini for vacation. When we arrive I have to fill in the names and addresses of at least 2 couples in the party who have not yet arrived. My address book is not up to date so I make up the contact information of the other two couples.

Then we are taken to our room that is so large that we end up sharing it with another couple. We discover that we have a big-window view of a landscape that looks like the Grand Canyon, but not like the island of Santorini. I notice that the bedspread is beige with small red flowers on it. Soon we go outside to get in line for dinner in a restaurant. Dinner on an island is always in an outdoor restaurant. A woman beside me tells the story of a restaurant mascot that is a cross between a vinyl figurine and a rabbit. I can see the mascot myself. This mascot has recently had a back operation and is now healthy. Other people in the line don’t like the woman who is telling the mascot story and so most of them move away from her. I stay and listen to her story and don’t think she is crazy. We never get to eat dinner anyway.

Then there is something like a parade in the streets and so we stand against a chain link fence to watch, It is not clear who is on the inside and who is on the outside of the fence. Soon a young man waltzes up to the fence wearing a long flowing black coat. The fabric is silky and quilted. He also wears a hat and has a small white flower in his lapel. In my dream I am continuously reviewing my dream so that I end up sleeping through the whole night without waking once. This is the first time that reviewing a dream has kept me asleep.

Dream One
The dream began with my husband wanting to pull the car in the driveway. He couldn’t because our neighbor to the right had his truck in our driveway and his leg in a kind of scaffolding apparatus that held his bones in place with pins and wires. When the neighbor saw us pull up, he rushed towards the truck, picking up blue plastic boxes that were full of vegetables. He stacked the boxes in the front seat of his vehicle that had no door. Of course they fell out all over the driveway and grass, so we pulled the car further up the street and parked there.

The house was full of young people who were under the influence of a local street vendor. When I realized that he knew nothing that would be of help to them, I hustled him out and although he plead his case, I didn’t believe him. He took his ice cream cart and left as I watched through the window. The window were trimmed with aluminum and swung out on a hinge.

One of the young men, a friend of my son’s showed me his delicate palms. They were decorated in henna patterns. One of his hands had a red eye in the middle of one finger. His hands appeared to be partially erased. He held them up for a long time and they seemed to be disintegrating as I stared at them. He was wearing a blue pin striped suit and I knew he was thinking of me as “mother.” Later, there seemed to be some confusion about who would do what in the young people’s business.

Dream Two
A friend and I were both in the hospital at the same time having babies. Hers baby was almost normal weight, but mine was a tiny, tiny male person, like a mite. He was so tiny that he slipped through a small hole in the top of the cradleboard where I swaddled him in blankets. I got down on my hands and knees to search for him and there I found many insects and creatures with beautiful feathery bodies and legs moving over the carpet, but I couldn’t find him because he was as small as a mite.

In my dream I am aware that the real estate market has problems, but I can’t discern who is worse off, buyers or sellers. We are in the market for a house and so we are walking a neighborhood looking for the perfect backyard. We need someplace that is flat because it will be our retirement home. Our search moves back and forth between walking and studying an aerial view. Since the aerial view is in black and white and on paper, I use pinpricks to designate the property boundary lines. I also distinguish some lots by making pinprick textures and patterns, inserting the pin from the back of the paper. Each lot gets a different pattern that shows up in tiny white dots. Finally we see a house that has almost no front yard because the driveway slants off to the right between two houses.

After that I’m in a dentist’s office to get a tooth pulled. The office is furnished like a bedroom and the dentist, an Asian man, will operate on me while I’m in bed. He prepares himself by kneeling on the bed. He holds a pair of pliers in one hand and a syringe in the other. He is wearing a grey suit. The nurse is concerned that the instruments are not sterile, so she keeps splashing liquid on them. The nurse and dentist talk about needing to go down an inch to and inch and a half to extract the molar.

Two women were members of a special-forces unit that was being disbanded. The men in the unit were being disbanded openly, but the women were being kept under cover. The office manager from the unit was ordered to take the women by motorcycle to another location. Evidently it was feared that the women would break down if they were captured and interrogated.

On the way to the new location the three on the motorcycle stopped at an open-air market to admire a large finely carved church screen made of wood and cloth. They thought that it would make a good room divider for a very large house. They folded the accordion style screen in order to put it in a container for shipment to the country where the house was located. While they were working on the screen, an old time steam locomotive pulled up and rumbled on past down the tracks located just next to the open-air market. Everyone heard the noise of the engine as it passed.

After collecting and packing up the screen they were ready to continue their journey by motorcycle. In order to hold on tight to the department assistant, the woman behind him had an extra arm. The third arm was short and the woman’s fingers had no feeling. The woman made sure that everyone understood that her fingers had no feeling.

I was reading Sebald before falling asleep so my dream was set near a train station, in an outdoor restaurant to the side and front of the station. I sat with a colleague who was pointing out the beautiful brick and ironwork on the building along the facade. Soon it was evening and all the waiters carried the tables individually over their heads down the stairs to a plaza below, where the evening meal would be served. The tables covered with white tablecloths bobbled above the heads of the waiters as they descended.

Once we sat down, my friend then pointed out to me the hillside landscape across the bay that was brown without almost any green. I repeated in response over and over that our city was supposed to be that way, brown and dry. There was no natural source of fresh water for the land. Somehow I felt vindicated in front of that view.

Airplane Dreaming

On a recent return flight from Europe I dreamt about a fantastic flight as I slept in the last row between my husband and a window. Things began normally until the pilots instead of just greeting us from the cockpit, came out into the passenger cabin. They were wearing jeans and slick European style shiny t-shirts that an athlete might wear. Each also wore large silver necklaces. They were friendly and shook each passengers hand. They had gifts for us too-a variety of colorful plastic envelopes and binders for stationery and paper. They cut off the envelopes' elastic closures with balls at the end and later we found out the balls were pills for one of the pilots who was ill. From the plane's windows we began to see all kinds of amazing aircraft and flying things-I pointed them out to my husband. Soon he opened a window to let in some air, until we reminded him that we might lose cabin pressure with the window open like that. Then we flew for a long time right next to the Great Wall of China, so that we could see nothing but the wall. The wings of the plane extended over the wall without touching it. In the last part of the dream our flying ship became a cruise ship and some capsules from outer space landed on the deck. Everyone ran to touch the capsules to see if they were real. One of the space capsule resembled a very large bicyclist's helmet that was grey with open spaces revealing a complex interior space. Finally we ended up landing on a mountainside in Portugal where friends of ours were discussing how to get their vineyards going again after the winter. Then the pilots were waiving goodbye to everyone and the one who was sick collected the little balls with the elastics still attached. As we walked down the hill with the pilots they finally admitted to us that they had stolen the aircraft and it wasn't the first time they had done that.

I was in an unknown building that seemed to be a school and one of the teachers who I felt questioned my honesty, wouldn’t leave the office although I told him I needed to use the restroom. Then suddenly before I realized what had happened he lunged at me and laying himself face down beside me, put three fingers in my rectum.

I thought he was trying to see if I really needed to use the restroom or if I was just trying to get rid of him. I did want to get rid of him, but now I had proved myself to him concerning my need to use the restroom. I felt ashamed to think that he had invaded my body with his fingers that way, and happy that my body had cooperated with my need to get rid of him.

Many people found out about the incident and they played hurtful jokes on me, like forming a line of cut clumps of hair up to my office door.

After this I became a student in a classroom waiting to receive back a hardbound book with my test scores written inside it. Although my grade was above average, it wasn’t the top grade that I wanted. I couldn’t tell if it was the grade I deserved. There were large notes from the teacher scrawled on the first page. She came up to me asking to meet with me. I agreed and took her up a hill near a fence and began to tell her what had happened to me as if that prior incident would explain a lower grade. For the effect (I think), I sobbed as I tried to tell her about the three-finger lunge.

I was being tested at the end of the school year on how my drawing skills had improved. The piece of paper I chose to draw on was handmade and full of imperfections but smooth. I had a yellow tinge to it and in places there was almost a faint image of some of what I wanted to draw or I made use of the imperfections as I constructed my image. My line style was scribbly and I used colored pencils to build up subtle color. The forms emerged as I drew and although it was to test architectural rendering, the drawing needed to be dramatic. From an angle, I drew two heads with hats that overlapped each other and I showed all the formal details of the hats as well as the space the figures were in. I worked on it until the last minute and felt pleased with the drawing. A friend walked with me while I turned it in, just in time. She and another friend looked tanned with pretty heads of massive golden red curls.

In my dream I drove twice from point A to point B. Not only was I able to make the trip in a very short time, but also I was able to take pictures of important landmarks like old churches and falling down barns with my digital camera without even stopping. By the end of the second trip I had become an expert at holding up the camera and shooting on curvy, winding roads without looking at the screen. I had become very familiar with the road. I realized that I got faster on the second trip because I timed myself. My wristwatch showed that on the second time around I made the trip in less than an hour. The only thing is, I have no idea how I ended up twice at point A.

I just had a perfect dream. Or it wasn's perfect, it was a completely logical story and even now seems logical by wide awake standards. So there are four or five of us living together—unrelated and one of the men kills one of the other men and there are neighbors who see something, they don't know what, through a partially opened blind. They invite us over, or me over, and want to know where the dead man is, only they don't know he's dead. Or he's only out. Finally they insist on seeing him. He is actually the person who made the arrangements for their rental. I seem to be the only one who knows about the murder in my own apartment and I finally tell the others, telling them to act like they don't know about the murder. The murderer does not know that the others know. And that is as far as I got.