I don't remember much about it now, except for the recurrence of the swan-like creatures that would start out looking dead or taxidermied or curled in on themselves--and then would slowly unfold or inflate into life-sized animate forms.

Before this unfolding, someone didn't realize that one was alive and flushed it down the toilet like some kind of feminine hygiene product (even though one is not supposed to flush those down the toilet).

Later, there was a sense of regret.

Also, a sense of having been tricked as part of some sort of devious, widespread hoax.

A diagram on the back of the toilet stall had given instructions for disposing of the swan-like creature and someone had only been following instructions.

As the swans inflated, people kept asking, 'Is that some kind of blow-up job?'

But they were real and alive.

They looked swan-like, but someone said they included human DNA.

Perhaps they were some kind of genetic experiment.

Another poet had hypnotized me and an audience watched as I walked like some kind of semi-purposeful zombie, maneuvering through what looked like a TV set kitchen. I stationed myself at the sink, methodically rinsing slush off my hands. The slush was from a bottle of some liquid that had been frozen and was now expanding out of the confines of the bottle. As I methodically rinsed my hands, the hypnotist made a comment about my age and my deadpan sounding rebuttal indicated that I was actually 80 years old. The audience seemed rather disturbed by this assertion (and I was disturbed by it, too, when I woke up and expended a little too much energy worrying about why my hypnotized dream-self might claim to be 80-if anything, I feel younger than my real age, not older-so is claiming to be 80 in a dream some weird portent of impending death or something?-I HAVE been feeling creepily anxious lately about heart disease and colon cancer and family history of such diseases).



After my age assertion, the audience members started making their own assertions about me-and most of these were negative, pointing out my faults. I was accused of being 'ME! ME! ME!' I was accused of being bitter and disillusioned with the poetry world. There were some other negative assessments about me and my poetry, but I can't remember them clearly. There was an implication of irreparable mental issues and something wrong with my brain function and even though I was not responding to the hypnosis properly, they should probably just let it be, because of the hopeless nature of my brain malfunction. At that point in the dream, they were discussing me as if I was some kind of case study and as if I wasn't there or couldn't hear them or it didn't even matter if I could hear them. Even though I was hypnotized and moving like a zombie, I could still hear them and I knew they were right about my brain. I had some awareness of the word brain pan. I had some vague mental image of a metal dust pan in my brain except it wasn't really a metal dust pan; it was more like a filtering mechanism that was stuck.



This FELT a lot worse than it sounds, I think. It wasn't so much the content of the dream I couldn't shake when I got up; it was the FEELING. Disease, death, mental disorder, being judged-all things I fear to the point of detestation. I hate the idea of my brain malfunctioning in a way that only outsiders could assess, because how would I know because it's MY brain and I am trapped within its confines, but on the other hand, how can I trust others to assess my brain?

It seemed to go on & on & on. It involved me and some other people in a large, multi-room cabin, which had been invaded by a huge bear. In some scenes, it looked like a polar bear; in other scenes it looked more like a black bear; but despite these coloration changes, it was always the same bear. It was scene after scene of me and the other people in the cabin trying to hide from this bear in different rooms, often by getting into weirdly contorted or flattened positions as if we were trying to disguise ourselves upon pieces of furniture or something. The bear was not heavily running or loudly lumbering about; it would just suddenly appear in a certain room--and then the air would be fraught with a heightened sense of panic, because who was he going to get?



My Boston Terrier was in the dream, too, except that in the dream he was a dark brown wiener dog. And at one point the bear got him and then he looked like a dark brown bloody hot dog. That part of the dream was more acutely awful; the rest was more like low-grade yet incessant anxiety sometimes flaring into panic.

I was rollerblading with Matina Stamatakis. We were skating fast, twisting, twirling, doing tricks across many sidewalks, past much scenery. It all seemed so fun, even liberating--but then we suddenly ended up in a large medical facility so that I could get pills for my condition. My condition had something to do with headaches and I was uncomfortable with the doctor in some unspecified way, perhaps related to his vague familiarity. It seemed we had met before, but neither of us was willing to acknowledge this. 'Nice to meet you!' I exclaimed in an overly cheery tone after he handed me my bottle of pills. I looked at the bottom of the bottle and it said, 'HEAD VAGINA SORE'. I felt slightly embarrassed that my headaches were impacting my vagina.

Then I realized that there was a second, larger bottle of pills in my pocket. It was a huge bottle of Wellbutrin. Nobody had said anything about Wellbutrin, I wasn't even sure what Wellbutrin was, but I was pretty sure it was a psych drug and part of me was disturbed that they had yet again tried to push a psych drug on me, apparently by sneaking it into my pocket. Then I took a look at the Wellbutrin pills. They were parti-colored caplets--half white, half pink. They were prettier and more delicate and less menacing looking then I had expected and I thought I might try them, after all. But the next thing I knew they had turned into bundles of bus tokens that looked like paper bingo chips--white with pink print and pink perimeters. Matina was inserting these bus tokens into something that looked like a cross between a computer and a slot machine. Perhaps it was some sort of non-traditional ATM. I'm not sure why we needed to use bus tokens to get home when we had rollerbladed there.

A large snake and a primordial dwarf were playing in the same bowl, supervised by the dwarf's parents, who were looking on in amusement. Afer what was initially perceived as a playful tussle between snake and dwarf, the dwarf was suddenly gone--and it was realized that the snake had swallowed the dwarf whole. One of the adults picked up the snake, stretched open its mouth and peered inside, and called to the dwarf. No response. Someone had a brief thought about cutting the snake open to retrieve the primordial dwarf from within, but that idea was decided against. Instead, the snake was returned to its bowl, beside which a dog dish filled with water and a large dog biscuit were placed, in the hopes that these items would lure the primordial dwarf from his new womb.