late last night near morning, I’m on a boat. tidy, motel-like room. a tuxedo'd, Costanza-ish dude keeps poking his head in to tell me “Trotsky is almost here! Trotsky is almost here!” then, a guy climbs in thru the window, who is Trotsky, tho he looks nothing like Trotsky, and I’m very excited to see him, because we’re old, dear friends. I kiss him on the forehead. he is exhausted and needs to lay down. I say in russian, “dear Lev, it is so good to be here with you again.” he lays down and doesn’t say much.

but wait, I think, it’s 2016. it can’t be Trotsky. so why’d I call him Lev? it’s a pun about art, I decide. “did you like the joke about art?” I ask Trotsky. Trotsky answers, “on a boat, everything one says is a joke about art.” I decide this is true and Trotsky is great
then I realize that it can’t be a pun about art, because calling someone Lev has absolutely no relationship to art. instead I tell him, “I call you Lev because you are our lion!” (this makes more sense because the name Lev, as in Trotsky, Tolstoy, or Schreiber, means “lion.”)
he looks over at me and says, “I am the Other Trotsky.”
then I wake up and see this! I believe this is as poorly as it is possible for the human mouth to produce the sounds of french. I believe Trotsky may have been a wooden figurine who sat too near a xmas tree & was accidentally turned alive by magic.
& most of all, I eagerly anticipate meeting the Other Trotsky, may his Other Revolution come soon.

dreamed a lecture about de la soul, without any real perspective on where or who I was in relation to this. I understand only that a professor (who I wasn't) was speaking on a kind of fifties-future (world's fair style) island podium. music by de la soul that I had never heard before. he described their newest record as the greatest work of art of all time. all their record covers were iterations of what is actually the cover of the recent eponymous record by the band The Adventure, in different pairs of colors. woke up & the music was gone. took a few minutes to remember different music.

last night: was very excited & curious to find self in n korea. wandered around among a lot of buildings atop huge hills, led to by vast gray sets of stairs. perfect & gorgeous constructivist-style pyongyang extending in all directions. then the thought, "but I warned Qingshan not to come to north korea, because what if he couldn't leave?" became concerned that I'd be mistaken for a spy. then met a deranged middle-aged american women holding a bundle of wild-colored balloons afoot some govt ministry building. can't remember what she said, but unsettling. first two things I saw when I woke up: (1) text message Qingshan had sent me in the night from china, which read "This truly is a huge, huge country with a long, long history"; (2) news reports of Obama's speech about nk rockets.

unfcomfortable & strange dreams the past three nights:

1) there is a particular other poet whom I know but not well. awake last week I saw the poet at a restaurant but was stoned & too shy to say hello. this past saturday night I dreamed that the other poet & I had made social plans; I was excited to strike up a friendship. I went to the poet's house which to my surprise was strongly redolent of my neighbors' house from around 10 years old. the other poet was cordial but not warm, & the awkwardness of our interactions, heaped up with my own self-consciousness over same, came to grate. after some hours of rabbity conversation, I stepped outside, frustrated that it hadn't been easier.

2) the next night, sunday, was the most upsetting. I was a part of a loosely-organized military force, a mob or an army detachment, who had captured a particular important family Nikolai-II-style, & were facing down their indignant threats of repercussion. our motive wasn't clear. we were myriad. I wound up in the room where some hundreds of us were confining the (maybe 17-year-old) daughter of the family. she had powerful language but did not frighten us. we were all acting as tho without choice, our cause unclear, & we were distracted by our own unhappiness. finally a notion rippled thru the horde that we'd not need to murder or in any final way punish the girl; she could be released. we were immensely relieved, a flutter of assuagement rippling across the hive. on waking that good feeling was replaced by a horror that lingered & seemed to strain against all yesterday's color.

3) there is a particular woman who hurt my feelings when I was 16, & whose life I visited again when I was 25 & found it hideously conventional (dullness in the name of a career, prefab heritage, fiancee without apparent magics). last night I was walking in a dream on 5th avenue in manhattan (high teens, near the mesa grill) & I spotted this woman at completely impossible distance. I managed to chase her down, & asked for news. she was happily married &, she revealed, pregnant with an odd pregnancy that could only be seen from one direction. she was with her younger sister, whose name I surprisingly remembered. they both had startlingly beautiful hair.

I have a sense that the three are somehow connected; some connections of course are obvious but not, to me, the most interesting ones.

my dream this morning: before bed I had been reading JM Coetzee & the Torah. fell into sleep thinking of sympathy in its relation to forgetting -- a usual thing. I found myself in a bar fancier than any I'd normally be at, leaning over a richly-lit board of polished light wood, next to an elegantly-dressed older woman, homely & with a discombobulated, antsy look. immediately I wanted her to like me. there is a piece I do not remember; soon I was sipping islay & this woman, who may have been JMC's Elizabeth Costello, approving the president to me. (I do not much like JMC; I do somewhat like JMC.) she presented her sympathies backwards, starting with a defense of his worst policies. "I'm sure we're both grateful at least for the war in Iraq." I told her I was not. "ok then, his economic policies." & so forth. finally I became annoyed & strangely proud, & I sd, immitating but not quite telling the (waking) truth, "I was married for five years to an Arab woman. her grandfather's name was Habib. don't tell me abt politics." I woke up very glad, as I have for a long time now been having a hard time remembering my dreams, at the detail of my recall, and I credited this (superstitiously?) to my yesterday having given up coffee, of which it has for ten years been my habit to drink ten or more cups a day.

dreamed I was back in Russia. knew I'd have to come home, soon, but dreaded the flight. stopped by an American-looking mailbox and began filling it with strange objects from a large valese (which I guess I'd been carrying with me). the cars on the street (I think maybe Sukorovskij street near where I used to live) were glass, and looked almost opaque in what light made it to them (thick clouds above). the objects from the valese may have been medical supplies.