going to piano lesson in Maidenhead with Mrs Rhodes I have to take a taxi the young taxi-driver is late & tells me how hard his life his problems – why he’s late have I got my black bag with my music in it? Yes – he has to stop because driving on the footpath there are children in the way – they move over he continues – turns right instead of left in the town & I’m confused I know this town but where am I? I get out & realise I don’t know the address – I go into a shop, stationery, toys, & ask to use their phone – first they find their own phone/address book – then a book with phone instructions & in despair I try somewhere else by now it’s 2.35 – the children sitting on the stairs are in the way & I push a boy down gently playfully & he rolls down leaving me room to get down ….

Some dreaming of friends

black tulips Alan Loney likes them
broken short stems I put them together again
for him try to hopefully
                           Roger Horrocks was there
I don’t know why now but
enthusiastic as ever

another to do with CMc
Intense & clear but vanished
quickly  

There's    nothing     baby     safe

earth    cakes    all     ...................

Alexander Brailowsky playing piano on old HMV 78rpm records -- 6 preludes by some central European composer -- who wrote this intense serious music? -- how did Brailowsky come to record it? -- it sounds all the same on each of the discs -- loud thundering unremitting octaves in both hands

 I wake to sound of heavy rain on  the roof

... going to a small dealer-gallery in a terrace house in some unnamed city. The dealer was selling a recording of a dull sounding rock group to a client. Enough of that. I went to go out: one floral wall-papered room with a floral-wall-papered door, led to another identically wall-papered room and so on, in series (a Robbe-Grillet/Last Year in Marienbad dream). When I finally got out of there, I looked around and could not recognise any of the streets. One was called Queensway. One led down a hill, but I knew that was not the way to go. I began jogging along laboriously in a street with shops, just keeping pace with two strolling middle-aged women. They found this vaguely disturbing. I needed to go back to my bed-and-breakfast, because it was already an hour after check-out time.

On the sheet of paper, the list, double-spaced, one-line
descriptions of each of the six murders of pianists I have
committed. I’m dead. I have confessed to all six.
A movie is to be made of them -- gory, throats slit.
The movie is about to be shown – I don’t
want to see that!

I have to climb down the ruined building - descend easily sliding down on one of the bright blue cushions - swim fully clothed across the blue green calm water - This is a place I know, no it's not - I'm not wearing trousers now - no worries, there's a clothes shop just over the road, but there isn't

In the dream someone smoking or eating [?] Moncatels. Your search - moncatels -

did not match any documents.

Philip Dadson back from New York brought with him a new improved amazing

way of printing out from computers, a long white rectangular stick that he pressed

onto paper briefly. How did that work?

...three uncles dead in car-crash I'm in a warehouse & responsible for cutting up their bodies for burial....takes me an hour to cut one piece into tiny pieces, a rack of lamb like a hand....warehouse like something from a Mafia movie where drug deals go bad....

This is so slow, I'm inexperienced & crying now....must confess to the two undertakers, I -- I'm Donnie Brasco? -- can't ever get this done in time for the funerals. They'll do it, but how can I find the money, when I'm sure it will cost at least $5,000 for each body.

1 .....something had been going on -- saw the shadow of a creature on the ceiling of small white room, no windows, descending -- not scary -- a parrot. I looked for biscuits in a cupboard and a white bowl for some water, because I knew the parrot had come to help us. The only biscuits I could find had jam in the middle & I knew that would not suit a parrot too well, but they were all I had. The only bowl I could find was wide and rather shallow, but never mind. I asked the parrot if it would like the biscuits and water and it said it would. "I'm glad you speak English," I said, knowing now for certain that it was a helpful person changed into a parrot....

&2 I was driving my car up a hill, round a bend, very badly, drifting way out to the right, dangerously, but it wasn't a car, it was a bicycle....Stefan was riding the bicycle and I saw him take off some thirty feet above the houses at the side of the hill, and disappear behind them. I heard him yell, in the distance, "Dad!". He was bloody, but no bones broken, walking towards me. But why had he been wearing his new green trousers when riding the dirty old bicycle?

climb old concrete tower with a
railing across the top between ascent
& descent but there's no stairs for
descent -- vertigo

at my house one afternoon, W has
returned from a trip -- I ask his son
for news -- I'm playing a small digital
piano -- a small dog belonging to a visitor
snaps at me -- I put my forearm into
its mouth and it quietens down comes
& sits on the bar

looking out the window -- a big
black ape-like creature whose mouth
is a mushroom I am afraid of it &
hope it can't get in the house

in a bedroom a very young Jason
is sitting in a corner eating a sandwich
-- he throws up -- & then wants to go on eating his sandwich --
I try to persuade
him not to

I am -- as a matter of fact -- in the throes of publishing my book 'Poussin's Humour'. The book already has an author's preface. However, in the dream -- and none of the following is fact -- two prefaces have now to be included, one each by two men, who have information about the long frustrating history of the project that leads to the book. The book is now swelling until it becomes a novel (of sorts), with my original manuscript in the middle of these various accounts. I have agreed to this gladly.

One preface is already written, the other, by a man who has just won Lotto, has run into difficulties. I have to talk to my co-author urgently about the difficulties. After a long search I locate him. He is sitting under a low wooden overhang outside a building. He tells me he cannot talk to me now, he has to look after a partly incapacitated adolescent for some time yet. He agrees to meet me after 2 pm.

I start to go up the hill -- it's about half a mile -- because I have to teach until 2 pm. I take a different route from usual. I set out at a speed but soon realise I will have to slow down, if I'm to reach the top. On the way I meet a man who used to be one of my students nearly thirty years ago. His hair is grey and he is smartly dressed, a lawyer perhaps. He goes into a building on the right of the street and I go with him. We meet someone coming out who tells us this is the Fine Science building, in the same way that we talk about Fine Arts. My former student begins to tell me how his generation's drugs of choice were not marijuana, but pharmaceuticals easily available either off the shelf or by theft. That must have been 1980, or maybe 1979, I suggest, thinking of the sociology and the history of student drug-taking, and he confirms that suggestion.

reading a pad with writing by an unnamed man, middle-aged or older, bearded,

a painter, Italian. It's in English. Word, Phrase. Two words, maybe. A few words

on each line ..... 'barefoot' ..... something sad, something else said. Again ...'barefoot'.

It's a video image. His bearded face and half length, above an advertising hoarding

with red edge & yellow panel ...... 'no erectile tissue' ..... His hands out of sight behind

the hoarding, moving. He invites five women to write on a white page. There are

five # 4 sable brushes in a water-pot. Unasked, I write a page with one of the brushes,

mixing some colour with a lot of white. This is how I must write, as he had.

cramped space of kitchen after party dishes piled for washing by the sink getting late I want to get the washing-up done when some young round faced curly dark-haired boy holds forth seriously about the group playing a familiar song – is that Talking Heads singing a ballad that we know from someone’s album – Mary something – you know his daughter can’t remember his name …”I need to see you again” – tall thin girl gets up deciding to play my digital piano that is right by the sink – she wants to move the three empty bottles but I say they don’t go out until Monday, that they stay there until then – where, she asks, is the on-button

[missing names: Nora Jones, Ravi Shankar]

to my annoyance
not in internal directory
03187-52 up inside jelly keyboard insert fingers
dialling number with or in spite of a zero disconnect
dream works registrar removed bookshelves stole
one needed same for Pennie transgendered Charmian
struggled with crowded corridor to see results board
blurred wrong glasses came ninth

There was another part to my dream last night but now unfortunately too vaguely remembered. It was something to do with Catholicism, a counterpart to the Jewish thing in the dream that followed it.

Awake in the night for at least an hour, again, until about 3.45 a.m., wishing I cd get back to sleep, then dreaming I was in my previous house at the end of a party, talking with a young blonde woman, a woman I'd not met before, downstairs, as all the guests were departing. I was standing there naked wearing nothing but a big happy smile, then went upstairs to my bed in a space on the mezzanine that, in that house, has no door. The young woman, who was not Jewish, came upstairs and standing at the other end of the space, leaning against the wall, near the bathroom, started to give me an ill-informed lecture about how Judaism was such a sensible religion and how much she respected it. I was saying it's not like that. And I just wanted to go to sleep. Children, a dog, other people kept coming to disturb my attempts to settle down to sleep and all the while I was yelling at them and pushing some of them trying to get them to go away. I wanted to go to sleep. Worse, there was even a way in up some stairs on the right that I had never noticed before and some people were coming in that way. I woke up about 4.45 a.m. hoarse from all the yelling.

My ex-wife came in and gave me a big hug. She was smartly dressed for her wedding yesterday, wearing a mink coat, white dress, pearl earrings and exceptionally careful make-up. Although she seemed happy, she was actually angry about something. Was it because I congratulated her on her marriage?

I'm on a ship that's broken down - will it sink? Seen from above in blue Pacific water it looks like The Titanic. Merle kicks a goal. I am clambering up a muddy bank. We get separated in the crowd hurrying to get off the boat. She has the car-keys. I'm packing up in my cabin hurriedly, interrupted by a maid who speaks almost no English. She's trying to clean the cabin, while I'm in despair at all the clothes still in the wardrobe and in drawers.
A boy [my son?] helps but hinders, packing a full hot-water bottle in my cabin-trunk. I tell him to empty it [& wake up]

I had to go from New Zealand to Portugal via Paris
to watch a dance competition. I was taken to
the airport [by whom?] but had to turn
back when I got there because I had forgotten
my passport [barely time to go back to get it].

I didn't know the name [much mumbling
& uncertainty] of the town I had to go to.
I don't speak a word of Portuguese.

I had with me a CD, made by a Portuguese dancer, of
his commentary on the coming competition, & the instruction
to distribute a thousand copies [to whom?].

I didn't get as far as
Paris before I woke.

Last night a Harry Potter movie kind of dream:

first day of the year back at my old boarding school, unpleasantly
clear to me as if I'd never left - kids rushing about shouting and
pushing one another.
I'm making - unlikely - an arrangement to go out to dinner with an
old friend. Will we go in his car or mine? But first must find out
what room I have been allocated.
The information is on a very small rotating drum in a glass case set
low down, about knee height, with three rows of names in red ink on a
band of paper that passes round a small spindle, I peer at it
hopelessly, short-sightedly, can't see my name there, can hardly make
out any of the names. I begin to grumble about the poor signage, and
wonder why I'm there, at my age.