It's the future and I have am in some gray industrial zone where I've been recruited, inducted, assigned to a work force for a nuclear plant. My job is to climb a wooden scaffolding and then dive off a platform and descend through a transparent tube filled with steam down through a vat of water. I do this over and over. At some point I am looking at the diving platform apparatus from a distance and start to have a realization of why have I been assigned to this task? Then, these Sovietesque ladies in charge start questioning me about the temperature of the water in the vat. There is a panic that a nuclear fission has occurred. If the water is cold, then its a fusion reaction. The water was tepid and someone is saying this is relatively "good" indication as we are all running and panicking away from the site. We end up in a public space room in a Central Park like area and I realize that a small camera mounted on a pole (as there are all over NYC, of course) is a surveillance camera. Am filled with dread. With a group of strangers in the dark am wading through a ravine or extended buried pipe in the park which is clogged. Sense of continuous and detailed considerations with these people about whom to trust in this situation. Wake up wondering if the Iranians have disclosed about their nuclear explorations as a "cry for help," from a faction within the government.

I was with my son J, and friend D. and two Black ladies on the subway traveling around the city carrying a large cumbersome television, suitcases and one of the ladies seem to be in a wheel chair contraption with many straps. At first we seemed to be in the Rockaways, sense of being lost, underground, tired. Then, in a playground somewhere in Brooklyn. J wanted to hang out with a group of teens. I vaguely promise him "later." There is an idea to go to the Baseball Hall of fame which involves at least two more transfers to trains, uncertainty about exactly where it is; much dragging of our suitcases, the TV etc. We are on Metro North and I see from the window apartments made of crushed, recycled glass much compacted with tower, spire like structures like Rodia or Gaudi . Everything is glittering, bright. I keep saying I don't know where I am. Uncertainty as to whether we are in the Bronx or out of the city by the Hudson. We are then in a taxi driving uptown near Columbia Univerisity, an area unknown to me but often present in dream. We go down a very hilly street with cobblestones lined with small, almost quaint Korean restaurants. Sense of a new discovery of a part of the city I hadn't seen before. We see a kind of flea market or kiosks under tenting near a cathedral hidden in the shadows. Another often dreamt of, unseen building. I seem to have to walk very carefully around gates made of glass beads, everything precarious but fascinating. Lots of amethyst jewelry,crystals on tables. I realize the cathedral, which opens into the market, is of "The Scientific Americans" or "Christian Scientists." Realize that I need to investigate their religion more seriously. People seem to practice by going into darkened rooms with carpeted benches and then lie down with backs on the benches and feet on the floor in neat rows and then talk in low voices to one another about their feelings and spiritual process. Have an association with this cathedral and "Faberge Eggs."

I am awakened suddenly early in the night - otherwise, doubt that I would have remembered this. I am standing in a sort of science museum diorama, a frozen installation of shattered human head fragments which are floating and dissembled - but completely still - Matrix-like- in air at waist level. I examine with interest an eyeball which is disassociated from the other fragments. Only after I awaken is there a sense of violence and repulsion at the scene.

I dreamt that I was trying to read a letter from a friend. Due to some cruel vagary of the printer, many of the letters had dropped out, the spacing was weird. Words were represented by just a few letters. Whole sentences were dropped. I was trying to read the thing, to sequence it together. Turned it over and the letter was handwritten in multicolored pencil in entirely the same manner - so the ellipses was intentional on the part of the writer. There were a set of small drawings at the bottom of the page - one of a necklace with small glass pendants - and what seemed to be a set of covers for books of poetry. Not clear if these were existing books or projected ideas for covers. I hurried to work in the dark through a strange neighborhood but went into a Calvin Klein like store and arrogantly with no intention of purchase asked the salesman to light two expensive candles that were for sale--as though trying them out. A small, brown, hairless cat watched us calmly as the man lit the candles - which turned out to be in the form of two small cats. Then, I went back out to the street. Accidentally kicked a bag on the ground. Opening the bag, a bundle of brooms fell out - primitive, archaic brooms made of gnarled yet smooth tree branches with a thatch of twigs attached; each broom of a different size and texture. I became beset with anxiousness about how to get the brooms to the writer of the letter - mail them or give them directly?

#1

I am with my deceased father in some kind of lofty like space - we're are doing that fun, gymnastic astral stuff - leaping up to the ceiling and flying around. Then, we settle down in this kind of hotel lobby, like the Algonquin? and he is showing me a velvet-covered phtograph album, very Victorian. Inside the album in a Harry Potteresque mode are sepia toned old photographs of my great- grandmother and other women. The photographs are moving like miniature movies-they are also in a hotel lobby environment having tea. My father seems to be suggesting that the answer to a secret - or something very important-is located within the motions of these people. I am striving to have them hold still, to understand what is going on.



the next day arrives in the mail a phtograph taken at a family reunion three months earlier-- which I had completely forgotten about.



#2

I'm in Coney Island under the train tracks picnicking with "mental patients" as the clients referred to themselves. We are only eating roasted red peppers. I break away from them and walk under the tracks in the shadows. There are stores and stalls here, it feels like a foreign city's bazaar sector. A man steps suddenly out of the doorway of "A xerox store" and gestures me inside. A radio is playing tango music and we start to dance, as bendable as rubber bands completely attunded. I hand him a palm-sized book on butterflies which contain poems and say: "all of these are for you."

I had trouble sleeping last night, so I worked on a project of writing poems in response to collages by Tony Fitzpatrick. One of the collages has a blackbird or starling in the center; another one has a bird also but it is titled "Grackle." So, I went to sleep wondering if the first bird were a starling or a Grackle also. I dreamed of sitting on the floor and a dark colored bird, a starling perhaps, was staring up at me and we seemed to be mind melding in some way; waves of empathetic feeling between us. The bird was very aware and intelligent. I felt like the bird was like my baby.