Last night I dreamed I was cleaning out my lounge room, which was cluttered with rubbish. At the same time I was trying to make lunch for friends. The sink was also cluttered with unwashed dishes and bits of half eaten food. I started to strip off the cushion covers from the couch. The cushions, a blue denim material, were stained, had collected crumbs in the corners and were full of dust. There was a whoosh of mess every time I shook one out much like the character in Peanuts who exudes dust particles and debris everywhere he walks. Pigpen is his name.

I am living in a pigpen and much as I try to clean it up I am overwhelmed by the amount of mess and the sense that I will never get to the end of it. Added to this I am to baby-sit my sister’s two small children, Costa and Bryony. I do not know any children with such names in reality but the Costa in my dream is the older of the two, around two and a half years, and Bryony is just one. Costa in my dream looks like my real grandson, Leo and in the dream his mother who arrives is not my sister, but my daughter and Costa is reluctant to part with his mother.

She takes time to take her leave, all the time reassuring her son that she will be back soon. He cries when she goes at last, but only momentarily. His sister, Bryony, seems not to exist in my dream during the leave taking but she reappears as I am taking Costa for a walk down some valley where I know there are a series of children’s entertainments in place.

Costa is delighted and runs from one stall to the other, whereas Bryony stays close to me. I have to carry her most of the time, she is only just now learning to walk. One stallholder calls us over to see her display of toys, which are mechanised. This does not impress me because I know that Costa will want one and, were I to buy one for him, I am sure he would be disappointed. These are not toys with which to play. These are not toys to handle. These are toys that you can only watch again and again as they go through their routine – nursery rhyme characters such as Bo Peep and Pinocchio, going through their paces.

Costa is enthralled until all the toys’ batteries run dry and they stop. He is annoyed with me because I have suggested we must move on. Somehow in response he falls into a long tub of water at one side of the stallholder’s lot. I am annoyed with the stallholder woman because she has caused Costa to get into a rage and now his clothes are wet through. The woman tells me that there is a second hand clothes shop for children not far off where I can find dry clothes for Costa. We traipse off in the direction of a huge barn like structure, which has a maze of rooms inside, each filled with racks of clothes for children, boys and girls, from infancy through to early adolescence.

Once inside one of the workers tells us that we can choose any clothes we like for free because today is a special day when they are treating children who suffer from cancer. Costa is delighted and runs off to try to find an outfit. Bryony is looking for clothes, too, and I try to help her to select a good outfit that will replace the dirty one she is wearing. I run off for a minute to make contact outside with my sister whom I gather has booked a taxi.

Once outside I see there has been a muddle with the taxis and it takes some time to sort out which taxi we will take to get all of us home. I have not yet found my sister who is due to return at any minute. Then I realise that I have abandoned the two children and I rush back inside to try to find them. It is getting dark and I have trouble getting back inside the building because a security guard has blocked my way. He lets me in when I tell him that I have still two children, my sister’s small children locked inside. I call out their names from one room to the next. I am hysterical now, beside myself with horrible forebodings of what might happen to those two beloved children.

I find Costa first. He has grown weary with all the fun of selecting clothes and he is slumped in a corner. Bryony is not far away from him. She is distressed but pleased to see me and I pick her up and take Costa by the hand to lead them out of the building. We get to the exit and I can see my sister across a moat waiting for us. She is now hysterical herself because somehow she has heard that her children are missing. I did not want her to know this before they were found but at least she can see them now, and she can see they are okay.

We try to cross the moat and must do so by walking through a deep gully that forms a damned section in the middle. We have to wait for passing traffic. Costa gets through okay but Bryony trips and hits her head. Her mother, my sister, stands in the distance and watches her fall. There is nothing she can do. She has to settle for me taking Bryony into my arms to comfort her; both she and Bryony must settle for that. I wake up before mother and daughter are reunited.

Last night I dreamed I met a Vietnamese man. He was holding a child. I had met him before, so we were trying to figure out how and where we met. We began looking at books together. On the shelf, there was P. Lawler's newest book, or books. I wish I could remember the titles. One was a brightly colored book with two halves to it—one half was "essays," the other poetry. Each of those books was divided into sections. The titles for essays and poetry faced each other on the cover, so the poetry title was upside down. I think it had the word dragons in it. The "essays" weren't traditional essays. They were elaborate drawings, some the color of illuminated manuscripts. They were maps with titles of bodies of water and land that created threads of narrative in simultaneity. Some of the lakes had Tolkein-ish names, but overall the multiplicity of the project was breathtaking. And the maps contained a lot of blue. Some of the poetry was diagrammatic but most was spatially seeded across the page, simply in text.

I had a dream once—or, at least, I think I did. I don’t remember my dreams, & this was no exception. So let’s suppose I had a dream which may or may not have occured, may have been remembered, may have just been a synapse activated by another incident, devolved déjà vu.

Let’s assume. Dream. In which I am walking past a row of shops, between rows of shops. Plate-glass windows. In which people piled up—no, faces pushed against the glass, one above the other, layers of them, levels, like a sequence from a Fritz Lang film or a page from a noir comic book. Mosaics of faces. I am walking past them. They remind me of sheep. I make baa-ing noises at them. Swear at them.

Then the scene changes. I am walking along a country road at night. The person I am with turns to me, says “That’s funny. I didn’t know there was anyone behind.” I turn, look; & under a streetlight about a hundred metres distant, is a person just standing there.

No memory of it. Memory of it.

No dream. Date stamp c.1960. Must be. Age, activity. Some University philosophical thinktank, out in the country, over a couple of days. Get bored around midnight, decide to go out & hitchhike north. Anywhere, away from the here. Take someone with me.

We walk. & walk. Main highway. No cars. Nobody. Reach the small country town that’s a couple of miles away. 1 a.m. Wait. No-one around. Decide to. Walk back.

A train goes by on the track that parallels the road. Freight train, lots of wagons, each several levels, all of them filled with sheep, meat train, will be, abattoir-bound. Baa-ing in the night, multifold, louder than the steam engine. I baa back at them, I swear at them. The person with me says “That’s funny. I didn’t know there was anyone behind.” I turn, look; & under a streetlight about a hundred metres distant, is a person just standing there.

No dream. The running. Away. The physical escaping the metaphysical. I do not go back. Do not.

Talk about it. Tell.

Diana (life long friend) and I are in some joint eating, and I have a big bag of stuff to carry out. There are people there who are in the theater or movie business, and I realize at some point that I applied for a job with them years before when I was young...something called "Hot Chicks" ( or something stupidly similar). I never heard back from them. The men we overhear are crude and loud. I have a big bag of stuff to carry, (baggage?) and it is too heavy. Then a guy reminds me that he knows I auditioned for them. I ask Diana if she has moments when things in her memory just disappear. I tell her I think I had a kid. She looks at me funny. I tell I think I gave it to Michele (a friend I no longer talk to) to keep for me, but then I forgot about it.She says No, you gave it to ME. I am shocked. I said where is she? (I seemed to know it was a girl) and she says she gave it to someone named Jo Jackson. A friend of her husband's. Noone I ever heard of. She said Jo was a woman who worked in a drugstore. I asked if Diana had seen the child and she said not often.

We start to leave the place, carrying the bag, going up and down stairs while I am crazed with the thought I have a child out there somewhere who doesn't even know me. The bag gets left somewhere. Diana wants to stop to go to the bathroom. I convince her to wait until we've descended all these stairs. But we wind up in a subway station that is dark and threatening looking. (it's from another dream about me trying to find/get on the right train). Diana has to go and runs into the ladies room and locks the door. I wait aside. And wait and wait. I realize she's not coming out. I am frozen with fear.

I wake up.

##

The Red Car

The daily papers in the back

seat spread atop the old women

come from the sex factory;

their mouths replaced

by labia, the desert beneath

their skirts sewn shut. The

passenger seat is stacked

with old bones, like firewood,

dead children and husbands,

parents and forgotten aunts

gleam like polished ivory

from years of travel. The driver's

foot is on the accelerator.

She leans into the wheel,

eyes squinting in the dimming light;

a tub of toothless smiles,

coy giggles but the car stands

still, waiting, waiting

for the traffic light, three

black moons that hang

above, to change.

went to the inauguration. the train rolls into pioneer square because the ceremony is actually in seattle, not dc.

actually on stage with obama who begins eating a chili dog during his speech because he wants to keep the atmosphere 'chill' with the people. i try to ask people if they thought that was acceptable after the speech, but no one seemed to care.

on my way back, after visiting my sister's college dorm room, got attacked by an elephant that happened to be wandering around a suburban neighborhood. i tried to dodge it, but it wasn't working, so i ran across the street where a white guy was watering his dirt.

i screamed as i approached, & he happened to have a rifle on hand & shot the elephant for me. i hid in his house while the carcass was removed & the street hosed off. his wife was jealous of me.

There is so much more to this dream than I remember. I am at dinner with a group of terrorists during a ceasefire. I sit at a table with the foreigners. Even their plates are set at an angle; differently from the way we set ours. One of the terrorists’ children is playing up and her father threatens her with immolation. I cannot believe he will do it or that others might sit and watch.

Then I am standing in the bathroom of my general practitioner, Judith Heale, offering to help her to fix the crack that has developed in her bathroom wall above the shower line. I offer to get a ladder for her, one of those short ladders that people use in libraries to fetch books that are out of reach. I offer to hold it steady for her. Judith hesitates about using this ladder. She tries to reach from the floor at her normal height. She does not want my help. She looks over at the group of terrorists eating their meal and I can tell that she is critical of them.

Now I am involved in a fight with a woman who has been violent towards herself and others. She will not stop killing people or threatening to get herself killed. She has a gun and will use it indiscriminately on anyone. She is tough. I manage to get the gun from her. I try to empty it of bullets, firing off to the side, but whenever I do, the bullets do not come out properly. They plop out from the barrel like jellybeans from a lolly dispenser.

One of the woman’s enemies comes by and they begin a physical fight. This time she is a goner, I think. Her enemy has a knife. By now there is only one bullet left. I hold it in my hand. The gun and bullet are now separate. Then the woman grabs the gun back from me. She keeps calling over to me to give her the bullet but someone else nearby manages to get the gun from her and he throws it down the stairs.

It is as if the gun were indestructible. An old man and a boy are now preparing to dynamite it. They have retrieved the gun from the foot of the stairs. They have lit a wick and are about to throw away the gun attached to the burning wick before it explodes. I imagine the gun will explode just as the woman is meeting her end. I still hold the bullet in my hand. I want both of them, gun and bullet, to disappear altogether.

The woman continues fighting her opponent, screaming like a banshee. They tussle. Occasionally she gets the upper hand and I think that she might stab him, but then he overcomes her again. Now a group of men, all of them the woman’s enemies, prepare a small fire. The coals are glowing red, and she finally concedes defeat. She lies down at the fire and rests her head on top of the glowing coals. Then she puts her blue coat over her face and rests motionless. I watch and wait for her to dissolve.

I still hold onto the bullet. The wick attached to the gun has fizzled out, but still seems to be smouldering. I wonder will the gun explode as she dies. I cannot bear to watch her. She lifts her head from the flames. She is still alive, but nearly gone. I can feel the bullet in my hand. I wake up and think of the words ‘the heart shaped bullet’, the title of a book by Catherine Flett, about the death of the author’s relationship with a man she once loved.

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

So, following my night with Obama, I had a dream where I got that pixie hair-cut. But it was VERY swiss, meaning it was ultra pixie short, white-blonde on the front and black underneath... don't know why I am having such strange dreams (just accidentally wrote jeans!)

Charles Bernstein is sitting at one end of a subway car, preparing to do a reading to be heard by the four or five other people in the car, one of whom is myself. Bernstein speaks a few words in introduction, and perhaps launches into the beginning of the first poem he'd like to read, when he is interrupted by an altercation between myself and a tall young man sitting somewhat near to me. This man, wearing a spiffy black coat, speaks of the food debris (bread crumbs?) and shards of glass near him on the subway bench, and accuses me of being responsible for this. He says that just because I am not a "popular person", that doesn't justify my making his environment degrading and dangerous--accusing me, thus, of acting out of bitterness. Bernstein, understandably disturbed by the interruption, walks off and finds a place to sit and continue reading two cars down. But his words nevertheless are piped into the car where the four or five of us are each fixed/rooted to our initial positions.

So, last night I kissed Obama 12 times! Oh it wasn't kinky and weird really. it was swiss ad innocent! We kissed on the cheek twice which is common and standard fair in these parts and then of course I insisted he kiss me again and again! He seemed tired and sad.

11-14-09

five dream parts

1

We know bees who
burst forth
from an eviscerated ox dermis
don’t we? We
learned it
in a book
and in a dream
of healing. It isn’t
the ox that gets healed.
It is the mind.

Oh the mind’s ox lies slaughtered
and the blood runs free.

The doctor called me doctor
and spoke in doctor code
about the ailment that she noticed
under the epidermis
of my shoulder.
How gently’d be
my demise.

She wore a white chemise
and I liked her.


2

It was a ruse
and I knew it.
I’d tell her
later
at our as-
signation down
the hill.
This is a dream
I’d say. When I wake
the white bees crawling
’neath the dermis of my shoulder
will not be there. But we never
arrived at the hill and in the dream
I never wakened.


3

Paintings
easily miming
famous archetypes—
this one’s a Cezanne.
The painter
threw it together
with a few apt dabs
catching just the right
posture of the slanting shoulder shapes.

Later we were all walking
credibly
down a hill in the neighborhood.
The doctor would be in.
Perhaps I’d call her.


4

I can’t focus properly
on the fourth part.
We were talking
about old girl friends, old lovers,
and the power
congealed
in their names.

One of them asked me to name them and I
rattled off a few rather casually.


5

Awake,
it’s winter
and the bees
are congealed
in gold clumps,
nowhere to be taunted
from the hive
and no longer fear
the white disease.

Shortly before five this morning, I awoke from a dream that consisted of one distinct, bright image. In the process of remembering the dream, I began searching online for black artists. While sifting through the results and following some of the links, I whispered the dream to myself so I wouldn't forget it. To my disappointment, the dream faded with each repetition. Shortly after five, I opened my eyes. I was still in bed. Our youngest son, home from working a late shift, was still up and listening to music in the kitchen. The dream was gone. And now I wonder if it really was a dream, or if I was dreaming that I was dreaming.

became a crossroads between the living & the dead.

in my waking dream Gerald Mast -- who in life was a great scholar of film -- was a glass artist. I went to his studio & pickd out a wall piece which also was a working clock. I gave it to Regina as a present. Regina -- a child psychologist -- told me it was a clock for children & didn't work at all in her house.

then I had Gerald himself -- along with an assistant (much like the "assistant" he brought on his final overnite visit to my house years ago) -- come to Elyria to install the piece at my parents' home. (when Gerald taught at Oberlin he sometimes came to Elyria to dine at the Paradise). Mother immediately disliked the piece much to Gerald's displeasure. he left & I woke before negotiating the fate of the glass clock.

Juliana Spahr in my dream last night. (known her since college). I wish I could bring back more details. It was stressful and instructional. Or I should say -- she was instructional in some kind of a stressful context.

I am sitting with a woman--I don't recognize her. She is blond with long legs that are touching my legs and maybe even implicated with them. I have just given her some cassettes. I think I am explaining to her that they are damaged and I recall clearly that the tapes seems to have gotten wet, swelled up and cracked the plastic housings. They were dry now but the damage remained and the tape could be seen hanging out and in some cases seemed to have morphed into different textures and in others the strands had doubled or split into several layers. The woman did not seems dismayed by this deterioration. She said she was a secretary and was used to giving and taking orders. Finis.

Edgar Allan Borges

It was some kind of convention but I cannot now recall what it was about. All I remember is the venue, Rotorua, and a group of us around empty wooden tables in a wide open room like a warehouse or a barn. In the shadows, the dark-skinned boys with lustrous eyes, waiting hopefully and expectantly to join our deliberations, were certainly Aboriginal. I wanted to buy a pot of honey and asked therefore where the nearest newsagent was. Lake Road, my friend said, so off I went into the town to look for it. Sometimes when we become lost in dreams we never find our way again but I did at last come to the right street and walked down it past brand new condominiums and office buildings made of steel and glass. The newsagent in the basement of tower there, naturally, did not sell honey but, as I went on across a glittering plaza, a secretive young man walked past me with his eyes fixed reverentially upon a small jar he was holding in both hands before him. A fair way along the road I came upon a cafe. Black and white chequered floor, bare tables, metal chairs, no-one in attendance. On one of the tables, an ornate bank note, of large denomination, in a currency I did not recognise; on another, a pile of small books with soft red covers. It was an honesty system. I paid my money and took away my copy. A strange script, cursive, stained like old blood on brownish paper. There were line drawings too, in black ink, hectic and a bit over done. The stories were by Edgar Allan Poe and two of them—a short one near the front, a long one towards the back—were on Maori subjects. I read them with growing excitement as I walked back up Lake Road. Yes, I heard a woman's voice say, we smuggled them out of America, we don't have copyright clearance, but it seemed important that these stories should be known in the country that inspired them. I was standing in the small porch of a public hall reading when out the door my father came. He looked handsome, relaxed, at ease, glowing with health and vitality. I hugged him. You look wonderful, I said. I feel good, he replied, grinning at me. About the age I am now or maybe a little younger. He and his friend went out into the yard, took off their sports jackets and began setting the bonfire that we would later light. I felt a sudden doubt: Poe? Or Borges? The Dutch owner of the cafe where I bought the book came up. A huge man with a perfectly bald head. Laughing at my brief temptation to steal the currency left upon his table. The Dream of Coleridge, he boomed. You know it? Who is to determine the ownership of dreams? Perhaps, and I know you have already had this thought, we have things precisely the wrong way round. You are not the dreamer but the dream.

I have been sleeping much more soundly lately. I have been having long dreams of strangely personal and direct scenes that feel real when I am in them, which never used to happen to me. For years my dream were totally surreal and insane and made of impossible images. Now the thing I find most often I am doing in my sleep is editing words on a paper. I will be in my sleep working on a sentence by inserting all these other words, and building it out from this tiny thing in long weird graphs that I then repeat inside my head and build, and find building, until I eventually realize I am sleeping. The aggravated and horrendous scenes that usually dominate now more occur in very brief and intense bursts, that kind of punctuate the long, more calm ones. I am told I talk a lot in my sleep. I think I am going to find a way to begin recording myself, or to transcribe the sentences I am working on when I realize I am sleeping, as I often find I am able to continue looking at the sentences while I am still asleep even after I realize I am asleep. I can never remember the sentences directly when I wake up anymore, though I am always left remembering how I said something I had been meaning to say in such a way. I need to figure this out.

I dreamt that my tooth, the smallest tooth in my mouth, very small in comparison to normal sized teeth, was loose. I wiggled it and remembered that this happens often - I often move my tongue over my teeth and feel them budge slightly, generally leading to paranoia. The paranoia always subsides, however, as time progresses and my teeth remain intact. This tooth continued to move though, as if it were on the verge of falling out, and I knew as my molars began falling into my hand that something was not right. I grew increasingly anxious until I remembered that despite my paranoia, my teeth never actually fall out. I concluded that if my molars were in my hands, it meant that I was dreaming. To make sure I was dreaming, I challenged myself to fly - and I did. I flew up above a Hispanic woman who watched me in disbelief and down the block of my old high school. I felt as if I had figured something very important out, yet I couldn't completely believe it myself. I wavered in flight because I still doubted my ability. I finally landed on the corner after having too much trouble remaining in the air. I walked into the first building I saw, an old, tan warehouse surrounded by wired fencing. Inside was bare and cold. Everything was painted this off-white, tannish color that clumped on the walls. There were thick, rectangular, cement columns dividing the floor space. I walked towards a counter in the middle of the warehouse and pointed at a boy around my age that was standing there sheepishly looking through paper work. I headed towards the bathroom which was past a small area behind the counter closed off by caution tape. He followed and closed the door behind him. It was a tiny space. We stood chest to chest. I grabbed his ass and giggled as he turned his head from mine. He was very shy and refused to look at me. I made some witty comment and he kissed my cheek once, smiled blissfully, kissed it again and walked away with an extra bounce to his step. I hadn't gotten what I'd intended, yet I walked out of the bathroom feeling rejuvinated and elated with the knowledge that this boy loved me. I walked passed the counter, found a plastic dress-up crown and put it on my head. I found a tiara for a queen and a plastic sword next to that. I placed the tiara around my waist, held the sword in my hand and flew out of the warehouse. Then my alarm went off.

Upon entering the BART station this morning I remembered part of my strange dream last night. "I" or my perspective was in the station with a group of people waiting on a train when this tiny little ball of a baby--like a bouncy, fleece-covered sausage--was dropped onto the platform. The baby/sausage rolled across the yellow safety strip and onto the tracks. This baby was TINY and didn't seem to have any limbs.

I wake up and something feels amiss.

I walk out to the living room and see through the window of the front door a plush orange and black spotted-is it a bobcat, mountain lion?-arch its torso up to the window and slightly thrust its body forward, showing me itself It must have run away-I think I saw it join and prowl with other cats as I walk up to the front door and open it This is Barrytown-varying levels of dug up ground, messy thick wet dirt crumbling rising and falling into substantial abysses the Barrytown folk, who are very gentile, possibly Victorian, upright torsos, chins in the air, parasols, coattails, walk along the treacherous terrain as if it was a paved city street, without wild cats, without abysses-I shout to the folk from my doorstep in a strained British accent- "Good day my lady!" I see a woman with tri-pronged pearl earrings strolling along-"Wonderful day for a walk isn't it?"

I go back into my house and a youngish cutesy woman is sitting in my living room. Right away I ask her-"Do you time travel?" She giggles and says something to the effect of-"Of course!" I ask her-"How?" She says, "by onomatopoeic potatoes" Then she picks up one of several pieces of white paper I have written words on, and the one she picks up says "Travel together" She smiles, slightly in awe, but knowingly understands the message, and she is happy

Escape
I am climbing up the steps in the stairwell of this rather amazing building. Is it a university? In one floor, there are broken blue bike frames embedded in the wall, in another, glass bottles. The floor is grey cement. The walls are rendered white. Everything is angular yet peaceful.


Another dream. Somehow, I know I have travelled forward a little in time. There is a girl wearing a red polo top and she and I are outside this office with glass walls all broken, blood droplets everywhere, like something has rampaged through. Then I am in the present. I am trying not to get caught by whatever-it-is. After moving around, I see the girl in red. I know we'll soon be safe. As soon as we're both outside, I have to be somewhere again, over there beyond those trees. I spot this massive-looking motorbike with fat, wide tyres [which I now recognise, after describing the dream to a friend, is similar to Batman's futuristic/awesome motorcycle]. I think Good, I'll get there quicker. But the bike is so slow. So slow. Slow enough that I actually have to let a car pass me. I feel frustrated and irritated.

And then I wake up.


The second dream is such an interesting variant of my usual getting-chased dream [which I have interpreted to be my deadlines-as-monsters]. I actually get to escape on a vehicle. Usually, I am trying to escape on foot. Maybe I'm thinking smarter?

In my dream i was writing poems where every line was followed by some phonetic remains of the former as a process of decay.
example

    the opposite bends
            opps   ends

I'm someplace that's part-way to hell -- a level before. It's a wasteland. I'm H.D. I came here voluntarily to help my once friend, Ezra Pound, do research. But things have changed. I want to leave but he controls this realm. I get his revolver and try to shoot him. The bullet heads straight for his chest, but an invisible force changes the bullet's path and it ricochets, almost hitting me. It's terrifying to know that he's invincible and so evil. We discuss the situation and I am resigned that I can't take him down. I make a comment that where we're at now is parallel to being in purgatory waiting to get into heaven. He's not amused by my observation.

I go back to my dorm room that I share with my boyfriend (who is also unhappy being in this part-way to hell realm). I tell him that we have to figure out a way to escape. Then a little girl comes in, it's Ezra's daughter. She and some other folks have just arrived in the realm to do research. She tells me that her father decided we can leave and go back into world. I know there's a catch, that we're only being sent back because it's time to play our roles in his plan -- which involves involuntary visions and prophecies. We have 30 minutes to pack everything, which we do hastily. I take a variety of rocks, including a bright red one. There are five stones that Chris says go together, but I'm not concerned about keeping them together. I'm in a rush to leave.

I'm back at home in my office. There's a bunch of books and texts -- some of which I don't want to put back in my library because they're Ezra's and so disturbingly twisted -- although I do want to keep the mystical stuff.

DREAM ON NEW YEAR'S DAY

woke to a dream in which I was at a party with Sophia Loren. as she was abt to leave she came over to give me a pink carnation. I quite despise carnations but I knew in the dream that I'd be taking it home to press because it was from her.

Beginning at the corner of Liberty and Court Streets in Salem, Oregon, in front of the old Reed Opera House, I run west down Court Street alongside a powerful white bull with long, wickedly curved horns. There are no people and no cars. The further we run, the more hostile the bull becomes; each time he tries to gore me, I ward him off by pushing my right hand against his neck. Soon, without stopping at a red light, we follow the left turn lane onto Commercial Street. About halfway to State Street, the bull suddenly breaks ahead, stops, and turns around to face me. He lowers his head and is ready to charge, but before he does I push with all of my strength against the space between his horns. He pushes back, but soon gives up and walks away. I run the rest of the way around the block alone. Then I look up at the third-story windows of the Reed Opera House and the bricks in between, and am amazed that they are exactly like the real thing.

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.

Briefly interacting with Elvin Jones in my dream last night, he had the exact same demeanor -- intense and gracious -- as when I briefly met him for real in the late 80s at a Jazz Machine gig at the Blue Note.

Remembered #5


Mostly in water. Motorboating.

The purpose was transport. A plexiglas boat filled with snack-sized candy.

Then a group of pirate/smugglers attack my boat. They use a large
vacuum arm to steal all my candy. I abandon ship & swim towards
a cave.

In the cave on hovering foam boards are images of pirates & smugglers WANTED.
There are a dozen or so of these levitating cautionary boards. I try
to break a board with the face of the pirate who stole my candy. I
cannot.

Remembered #4



Europe, after the last great war. Specifically England as I could
understand language, though there were no natural citizens of place
here. & no speaking.

It was empty.

Empty streets. Empty buildings. Empty bars.

Except for music playing. Muffled, scratchy, & phonographic. In the
distance somewhere, unfound.

Then, in a building & looking up I find hundreds of silver light
fixtures. In black marker written on the side these lights were
labeled:

"The Yankee Kiss"

I find people on the street; the cast of Mad Men, specifically Don
Draper (Jon Hamm), Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), & Ken Cosgrove (Aaron
Staton). They are wearing grey wool overcoats.

I was standing in the street in front of my brother's house. In my brother's garage, Albert Goldbarth was pushing buttons and pulling levers on some machine. It looked like a printing press. I walked over and stuck my head in the open window and said, "What are you doing?" He said, "I've built a machine which produces poems, just cranks them out." I said, "That sounds great, but I've got to go to work." I'm such an
idiot.

I had this funny dream that Joshua Clover had produced and released the 5th Big Star album. It was a beautifully designed consumer product, in a shiny paper case that folded out several times, with lots of beautiful bright stars, suns and moons inside it. I was very excited to listen to the album, but woke before I could do so.

I was in a post-nuclear future. It wasn't that bad.

I sat by a murky pool and watched a spaniel swim. I sat next to the child who had some relationship to the spaniel. The spaniel was supposed to fetch a thing lost in the water, but lost its strength. Later I learned that the lost thing was another spaniel.

A book, not a spaniel, surfaced in the pool. I fished it out.

It was a book by Georges Perec. Or rather, it was a scrapbook by Georges Perec, made with scissors and glue sticks. It had many small works about pandas and employed, as puns, roman numerals.

One couple (vacant & professional) had recently come up from a basement in which they had spent ten years. They had had four children. One boy survived. "I could not find a place for him to die like the others," the mother said. "The others I grew tired of, but this one I could not bear to let go."

I usually wake up 2 or 3 times each night.
One of the dreams I had last night
is rather simple but is unusual in that I had it twice.

Apparently I had a kind of coupon for a large knot pretzel,
but since I cannot eat such food
I was trying to pass this coupon on to someone else.
(Some of my dreams are lucid dreams.)
Don't know if I ever succeeded because each time
that was when I woke up.
I think I know specifically why I had this dream
but I'd rather not say.
However, I can say the crux of it
matches the crux of the majority of my dreams:
frustration.

the weird off-brand auto called

Imperial, its base model the “Marvin,”

the seaplane coming in for a landing

over the streets of Flushing, tiny diner

with a long line for the men’s room,

and the dark car parked by City Hall

with C---- H------- in it and a monk

friend of mine, both strangely com-

panioned by unscheduled women, both

men a little shy, I told a man

beside me just to have something

to say how I would love a seaplane

to have one to roar down on Long

Island Sound for a landing by night.

He said nothing. All the new

Marvins in the dealer’s lot were

shiny two-tone green and white.

We have to go to see the Botanical Gardens. I have no idea who "we" are or what exactly the Botanical Gardens are, but it makes perfect sense. The trip occurs in a big red Hummer. I insist on riding on the roof on my stomach. I grip the edge of the roof with my legs and hands. My head is up. We're driving fast, and I have to hold on tight. It's like flying if I ever had a flying dream before. The Hummer rips down twisty, windy roads on the way to the Botanical Gardens. Everywhere, the jacaranda is blooming that pale violet grey color and the flowers are falling.

It's extremely pleasurable.

I wake up from a dream with a memory of hearing a voice saying these words: What is a human? It is a boisterous lamp that goes everywhere.

**

I want to share my coffee with a woman who is sitting with me so I go to the counter and ask for a cup. The waitress reluctantly gives me one but I have to scrape out some vegetable scraps from the inside of the plastic glass. At that moment I see two bluebirds. They are fluttering their wings rapidly but staying in place in the air in front of me. Although something is partially blocking my view, I can see them and now I can feel their feet and the beating of their wings as they stand on my fingers. I want to show them to Toni.

I wake up and tell her the dream (in reality) and a couple of hours later we are sitting near a window at Ozzie’s, a coffee shop we like to go to in Park Slope. We are drinking tea and coffee and when I look up, I see a large yellow school bus parked in front of the window. To my amazement on the license plate are the words “Blue Bird.”

Last night I dreamt that I had been sentenced to death for an undisclosed minor offense, and that I was to be given a lethal injection at midnight. As the time approached, a crowd began to assemble in the auditorium, and when I peeked into the room I heard a reporter say, "And there he is." So I walked in and said, "Yes, here I am, that horrible evil-doer," and I started dancing like Groucho Marx. The people laughed and clapped. I walked back into the corridor. To a woman from Spain, I said, "Do you know what bothers me most about this? What bothers me is that I won't be able to write about it." And I started to sob. But the woman had no sympathy. She told me I was using death as an excuse.

Broad daylight. I hear a noise in my mother's room. I open the door, find my father asleep in bed beside her, his head propped up against a thick pillow. He looks younger than he did when he died thirteen years ago. My mother looks even older than she does now. I close the door. I know he will have questions for me later on after he's rested. I'm not sure how I will answer them.

...last night dreamed of a young lady vampire who didn't remember that she was a vampire and was surprised when her hand lit on fire when sunlight touched it.

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 am walking through a mall; I see a store that sell CDs, maybe books and other stuff, too. I want to look through the CDs, to try to find the albums of an absolutely remarkable rock band. I can't even remember the name of the band; but I will walk around the CDs, hoping that as I look at different band names, the name of this absolutely exceptional ensemble will jump out at me. This motif has appeared several times in my dreams; it has always been accompanied by a feeling of extreme urgency, as if I were searching for the "lost chord".

I enter the squat building that houses the CD store, but instead of being in any sort of store, I find myself in a room in which people are sitting at computers. It seems less like a computer cafe than a dingy room in a college campus building. After I sit down at one of the computers toward the front, I experience frustration accessing the pages that I want. One thing that bothers me in particular is that at a moment when I expect certain information to appear in print on my screen, I instead hear a voice intone the information chirpily. Somehow that is unsettling.

I use the computer to access a help desk. I end up having a dialogue with a take-charge confident woman helper. (I'm not sure if the dialogue is all through email, or if there is some sort of phone-like communication with the woman). There is eventually disagreement in our communication, and the problem is not solved. After the conversation is over, a tall man, a supervisor, at the front of the room tells me I had behaved in an improper way in the exchange, but I maintain that I had been respectful and reasonable.

The woman I had been communicating with via computer enters the room to speak with me in person. We proceed to have this face-to-face dialogue, but it isn't clear what is said, whether anything is now solved, or what emotional texture this conversation has. The woman walks out of the room. I turn to a short bearded man at the back of the room who had been standing near to where the woman and I had been speaking, and I triumphantly ask whether there is anything for which I could be criticized in that exchange.

He surprises me by telling me that in fact there is in fact much for which my conversational approach could be criticized.

This man goes on to tell me about weddings in which a man has settled for a woman who is very much unlike his highest ideal. He recommends such a wedding for me, and talks about the ceremony of one such marriage, as if there were a special ritual for "settling". I think to myself that this is like the marriage at the end of the Israeli movie "Late Marriage" wherein the male lead finally settles for one of the "acceptable" women his Soviet Georgian descended family and their matchmakers are always pressing upon him. I am told by the short bearded man that one moment of the wedding ritual involves the flight of wild geese.

I am back in eternal Gloucester where an ageless Linda dwells among her seaweeds herbs and objects and she says—“Three times we have been together, and I ask you, shall there be a fourth?”

I had been expecting—not so direct an invitation. It is quite impossible.

She spins into a tirade condemning me to a life “utterly without Earth.”

A student of mine hears all this. The car that brought us to Gloucester—but it isn’t Gloucester now. In fact we have to get back to Gloucester, which now is New Paltz, more truly. The car is missing from the motor-garage-lot-space, even though it wasn’t my car—someone else had brought us there. I wasn’t so much worried about the lostness of the vehicle, but just how would we get back to—

that other town –Cambridge possibly.

I had a ring of innumerable car keys with license number tags for each, and I think I know which key belongs to the missing car. I am not actually sure now that the car is missing, but only that I can’t tell which of the vehicles in the lot the one I’m supposed to be driving actually is—none of the license numbers on the autos fit the keys.

Eventually an attendant volunteers to drive me.

Simultaneously I am running along a road along the ocean at sundown back to town. There are leaning, broken trees against the roseate and orange luminosity of the sand and behind that, down a sand slope, the radiant water. I pick up one after another large sawed-off narrow trunk sticks as walking sticks or running sticks, but each is unsatisfactory and I toss a sort of squat one into the sea.

People are beached doing a Hindu ceremony, Vedic possibly.

Now I’m in a shop or museum scene at which the exhibits are backed up by people---vendors of the views each exhibit proffers. I approach one and knock over something—a vase—and it shatters on the tiles. I offer to pay, but the vendor seems interested more in the substance that spills from the vase than in exacting recompense.

Back in town, getting out of the pickup truck that took me and my student to wherever—I want to talk to the student about what he heard of my conversation with Linda, but this in recollection turns out to have been a lecture or a talk or even a poem by someone who might as well have been Charles (Olson) and though I had worked my way through the lecture without too much disturbance, my student IS disturbed, and wants to go to Robert (Kelly) –he’s Robert’s student also—for some kind of clarification or further work on it.

The lecture was about Amira Baraka, whose name I mispronounced, and now we’re somewhere that had been before the election Obama’s headquarters there, and there’s a part of my flesh that has an Obama button incised under the surface of it with the pin sticking out. I quietly work at the flesh until I am able to remove it without serious tearing.

I was showering in a bathtub with no curtain. The tub was in a large room that was still under construction — the lumber and wiring were visible. Because of a slow drain, the tub was almost completely full of water, some of which had sloshed over the side and onto the floor. Not wanting it to overflow, I turned off the water — but then I remembered that my hair was still full of shampoo, so I turned the water back on to rinse it out, except that now the nozzle was on the other end of the tub, and I could see kids playing outside through a hole in the wall where a window would eventually be. As soon as the shampoo was gone I turned off the water, only to find that my hair was already combed and dry. I stepped out of the tub fully clothed: I had on new dark-gray corduroy pants and a colorful sweater vest I thought I had worn many years earlier. I walked with confidence, minding my much-improved posture, into a corridor that led to a large conference room that had been divided with temporary carpeted partitions and makeshift doors into small galleries. One gallery had a display of small carvings that looked like little beehives with faces on them. The next gallery was called the Glass Room. In it were several small round dining tables set for dinner, complemented by heavy, ornate glasses rimmed with glitter. The glasses were wide, without stems. Across from the Glass Room there was a snack bar, but no one was on duty. I walked past the snack bar into another room that turned out to be a dirt lane into what I thought must be the eighteenth or nineteenth century. There was straw scattered along the side, and the walls were lined with enormous old books. I saw a gigantic set of encyclopedias; each volume was about a foot thick and four or five feet tall. I walked further, then entered a wealthy old library: another wall, at least twenty feet high and forty feet long, lined with beautiful books of various sizes and bindings, covered with dust. I wanted to look at them, and wished there was a ladder. I turned away and went into another room. My brother and his wife were there. I told them I couldn't sleep — that I hadn't slept for years, because the bed was so hard, no matter how well it was made. My brother nodded, then said he had the same problem with that bed, that he rarely slept more than five hours a night, unless he was "working on Saroyan" — referring not to our cousin, Aram, but to his father, Willie — in which case he didn't sleep at all.

During an early morning thunderstorm, I had the following dream:

My mother (who suffers from dementia) and I were having a long, involved but coherent conversation. As a thunderstorm started, she got scared, broke off in mid-sentence, turned to me and said, "You need to call your family." She wouldn't tell me why, but insisted upon it. She even started dialing for me but didn't know the number. For some reason, I told her to dial615/859 (the first few digits of my father-in-law’s number in Tennessee), and that was enough to get through. My sister-in-law answered the phone but didn't say hello; it was just her voice listing all the people who were there, including my other in-laws. I could hear them all talking to each other over the phone, but no one seemed to know I was on the other end. I kept trying to tell her why I was calling, but she didn't act like she could hear me.

Eventually, one of my sisters-in-law came into the room with Mom and me, and greeted us. She asked how Jerry was, and since I assumed she meant Jerry Jennings, the mayor of Albany, I said something like, "Same as always. Thinks he runs the world." At this point, I remembered my mother’s directive to call my family, jumped up in my dream and actually woke up. It was 4:44, and the storm was fading in the distance.

--------------------------------------------

Some of my family and friends were throwing me a party. When my husband and I arrived at the party, it soon became clear that it was a baby shower for me. I was surprised I was pregnant, but not really, and the one problem was that I had been drinking wine during the days before the party (since I hadn’t realized I was pregnant). I apologized to my husband for jeopardizing our baby’s heath, and he assured me the baby would be fine. My dead mother-in-law began handing me gifts, and after I received many things for the baby, she gave me two presents I recognized somehow, gifts from my husband. One was a strange watch somehow made of denim, and the other was something made of glass, like a small balloon. At some point during the shower, two smallish men came in to talk to us (we all were apparently going to a concert after the shower), and they were very nice and kind. I remember looking directly at their faces and realizing that they were deformed. But I kept looking and smiling at them as they smiled back. Then we piled into my mother-in-law's car and drove to the concert.

Dreamovie 68



I return to the American School of Tangier, though it looks nothing like the school itself. I am on the bottom floor of the dormitory, and it is quite empty, and the person I have just been talking to decided he didn't want to talk to me and has left me alone. I try to get the attention of others, whom I cannot see, so I take a potted flower and put it in a lounge area. I leave the room and hide, and the flowerpot explodes. The bomb isn't powerful, though, so it doesn't damage anything, but it leaves gooey gobs of a gelatinous green substance on the walls, which sticks to the walls in well formed clumps.

The building remains empty, and no-one comes to investigate the explosion, so I leave and I discover that Karen is with me. As we cross a side street in the city of Tangier (which is not Tangier at all), a car pulls ups at a corner and the mad who would not talk to me is driving the car and he rolls down the window. He wants to talk to me now, so he does, answering my now forgotten question. He also has a question for me.

He drives off and Karen and I continue walking, finding ourselves in a residential neighborhood that is obviously American. As we walk along, more people join us, people we apparently know. We are trying to travel along a certain defined course through the neighborhood. The goal of this enterprise is to expend as much energy as possible doing so.

I decide to ride a bike over the trail. People say that that will make my trek too easy for me, but I say I'll set the gears to make it as difficult for me as possible. I do that, and still I move much more quickly than everyone else--yet I do use much more energy as well, since I set the gears in a way that makes even going downhill a difficult proposition.





Dreamovie 69


I am at work, though not a workplace I'm familiar with in my regular life. The space I am in is much like a kitchen, and I am pulling out drawers and sliding shelves in cabinets looking for something. All I find are piles of butter knives, which I run my fingers through as I look for something else.

I move by touring bus to another location, another archives. It is raining on the highway as we travel, and we stop at one point and stand on the side of the highway watching vehicles drive by. Ray is one of us on the trip. I don't remember anything he is doing, but I recall he is talking. I remember hearing his voice.

The place we end up at is an archives in an old house, something of a mansion. Kathleen used to work here and she is looking for someone she knows. We are milling around on the corner as we waiting, talking. Eventually, the woman Kathleen is looking for comes out. She has long dark hair and seems much younger, early 30s, than how old she should be. Her name is Iorria. She walks out to the corner, talks to us for a little bit, then continues around the corner with one of the men in our group. As she leaves, I realize that I know her, and I tell our group.

Our group follows in Iorria's path, entering the building. We find ourselves in a large room with a cramped felling because it is overfilled with books. This does not seem like an archives at all to me. It seems to be nothing but a library. In one corner of the room, just under a bank of windows, I find a large illustrated book resting on a dictionary stand. It is focused on a particular branch of science, one I have never heard of before. I open the book, pretending to pretend to be interested in it. I recite the title of the book aloud, stumbling over the pronunciation.

Kathleen comes into the room, excited about the place, but I do not know why.

I am on a highway going somewhere, though I don't know where.

I discover that I am living in a city, specifically in an apartment with a strange mass of people, mostly children and an old man who is our leader. I understand this fact before some of us leave from there to go to an event in another location. A bus takes us there, and I know that the event is somehow related to my work.

When we arrive, we exit the bus and walk to a large nondescript building in a parklike setting. The building is white with a large concrete overhang that protects a deep porch before the entrance to the building. We enter the building and wander through a reception.

In the basement, some meeting relating to work is going on. Two staff from my work are giving a presentation, and they begin complaining about some hypothetical situation. I complain back to them, and Gail (who is one of the presenters) asked why I am disputing what they are saying. I say it is because they do not have enough information to make a decision. She is skeptical of my answer. The room we are in is something like a kitchenette in an office and it has the same drawers and sliding shelves as the earlier kitchen did.

Nancy and I have to leave quickly for another event, and we leave with a group of others who were on our bus. I now have a bicycle, so I use it to jump over the steps leading down from the building. These steps are arranged in three sets of steps, so I make three jumps. Apparently, the bicycle is supposed to speed up my travels, but I end up behind a group of people walking a pathway through the park to the bus. And I don't think to ride the bike around them and on the grass. Nancy says that we're five minutes late already and it's my birthday in time: 5:25. We are going to the installation of an eagle scout, and Nancy has to give a speech there. We hurry to the bus.

As the bus returns us to the city, we see a few things. First, there are four wild turkeys perched on a third-floor windowledge of an office building, then we see five of these birds resting on a concrete platform by a building, each a flattened oblong of bird. An old woman is sitting by them, trying not to disturb them. We wonder about capturing the birds to use them as food, but we realize that will make the turkeys more skittish and we won't be able to enjoy their docile presence any longer. We also see a large brown building that serves as a home for boys. It looks like a pleasant sturdy building, but as the bus passes it we see it is surrounded by a fence and is no longer open.

At the bus station, we try to figure out what to do next. We are inside the station and an official there is asking for receipts for whatever we have bought that day. We don't know why or what he's going to do with them. One woman extracts her day's receipt from her purse for him. But I decide to leave, trying to find my apartment in the city.

The apartment requires me to walk up four floors and the stairs are huge taking up most of the available space on each floor. Our apartment turns out to be just the wide landing on the fifth floor. There is no other room there. The apartment includes an armoire at one end of it, which is filled with our stuff, and a large bed covered with papers, CDs, and toys. Some of my apartment mates are there, including a young black boy who is very personable and who is looking through the items of the bed for a CD of his. He can find two others, but not this particular one.

Without leaving the room, I am in China on a trip and walking around the same city I have just returned to. I am quite disappointed by the experience, noting upon my return that I have not even had any Chinese food while I was away. Back at the apartment, AM talks to me about China and about this one woman who was hired as an actress to work in a restaurant. She is not considered a good actress but is the best they could hire, and they do what they can with her. As she tells me this story I agree with the conclusion as I look out the window at a tall pine tree ending with an almost bare point that rises feet above the rest of the tree.

I then find myself in the presence of the actress AM has been talking about. She is blonde and American, which surprises me. I cannot tell what kind of actress she is because she is not acting, but she is ebullient. She has the outgoing character of many actors.

A black man with short salt-and-pepper hair shows up at our apartment, and he is a bishop, dressed in a bishop's less formal attire. He is there to talk to us. As he does, a man arrives looking for his son, and we realize that the bishop is simply the boy with the missing CD, who has somehow grown and aged over the course of a few minutes.






Dreamovie 70


I am running in a train station, not fast, but steadily. I'm not trying to catch a train but catch up with someone. When I do catch up, I talk to the person.



From the train station, I somehow make it to a fire station, which is crowded with people. I am on the second floor when an alarm comes in. Instead of sliding down a pole to the waiting trucks, we move towards the open second-floor window. As we stand at the window, the wall opens up and we see a helicopter floating just feet above the window. The helicopter sends out a rope and we attach our harnesses via clip-on hooks to that line.



This line helps the five of us slide into the helicopter most efficiently and safely. But we don't slide up into the helicopter. Instead, we slide down into the shell of another helicopter, our fire department helicopter, which is now suspended in the air outside the firehouse, but higher into the sky. The line that we used to slide into the helicopter is now a fuel line being used to fill our helicopter's gas tank, but it's also keeping us aloft.



I'm the pilot, and I can feel the helicopter plummeting to the earth, though the passengers appear not to feel it. The tension in the line holds us aloft just long enough to allow me to gain control, but the helicopter swoops down and then over, in a dramatic half-loop, as I begin to maneuver it. By this point, the helicopter is not low near the ground but high up over an old city that includes a number of burning buildings.



I fly the helicopter low over one large building, and we dump water so close to the fire and with such volume that the fire is instantly extinguished. We continue putting out fires across this dark grey city.



After putting out all the fires, I fly the helicopter low over a building that resembles the Colisseum. One of the firefighters, a woman, is filling the center of that building with water while she stands inside the building. She is about twice as tall as it is, and the water is up almost to the edge of the surrounding walls. I tell her to stop filling up the building because she will drown the people there, but she doesn't stop. She asks why it matters.

Feeling sad, I went to a diner to meet a friend. The diner had only three walls. My friend wasn't there. A woman who looked very bored nodded in my direction from behind the counter. A family of people with very large heads, grotesque from their thoughts, got up to leave, completely ignoring their little girl who was rolling and kicking unhappily on the floor. The girl's head was also grotesque, much too large for her body. She jumped up and ran after the adults. My friend arrived just as they were leaving. "The thing about strawberries," he said to me, "is that they're wild. All you have to do is go out and pick them." In my mind I pictured long rows of commercially cultivated strawberries wet with dew, and how wet the workers' feet and pants and hands become when they pick them, especially in the morning. I knew my friend was aware of strawberry farms, and that he had, in fact, picked berries to earn money when he was in school. But I also knew he was right — strawberries really are wild, and will take over your backyard if you let them, and even take root in sidewalks, curbs, and streets. Strawberries, everywhere. Their color and scent. I thought, "Now, that's exactly what we need."

A scenic sky journey at dusk becomes a free-fall when I'm separated from my traveling companions. At first, when they're still in sight, I yell to them that it's windy, and that I won't land where they expect. They yell back and wave from their drifting balloon-less basket — they think I'm joking. Then I'm swept into darkness over the ocean. Falling through miles of dense clouds, my face wet, I wonder how far underwater my momentum will take me, if I'll be able to make it back to the surface, or be killed on impact. Should I try to land on my feet, or go in head first, arms extended? I try turning every which way, but nothing seems right. And then, from the front window of my childhood home, I see a small group of friends and relatives in the graveled driveway. I go out to greet them. They ask me about my ordeal. I laugh and tell them it was nothing. Their expressions are sympathetic; they are there for my funeral.

I was standing on the steps of the theater in Chicago where Oprah is filmed, the whole place vast and empty. I wondered whether the pinky-purple of the set contributed to how cold and drafty it was. Also odd was the pervasive feeling that I was standing at a great height, the dizzying vertigo of standing on a very tall and very narrow platform. People started to file in until the space was full and then it was a stadium into which people just kept pouring and pouring. And in this great wave of people was tangled Oprah herself. She was crying, rivers of mascara down her cheeks, a curly wig slightly askew. I approached her and said, 'Thank you for helping to elect Barack. I really mean that. Thanks.' She was very gracious, said 'Of course' and kept joyfully weeping. In the dream, she was also going to give me a job and I thought, 'Oh dear, this means moving to Chicago....' and thought of the constant chill and I believed that this was all very good but that winter would eventually break me.

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.

I was some sort of domestic in Flaubert's household, along with one other woman, and since Flaubert spent all day writing (standing up) outside in his garden, it was up to me to make sure he wore enough sunscreen. I felt very proud I was entrusted with this task.

One part of last night’s all night dreaming involved the dismantling of the bay bridge, specifically the span between treasure island and the city, which ‘they’ just sort of unhooked from the island and let hang down into the water. ‘They’ did this over the space of a weekend, and part of the deal was that people were ‘allowed’ to swim across the bay for this one weekend only. I looked down from the bridge (the span between oakland and treasure island was still hooked up) and saw Kevin Killian and Ron Palmer swimming and playing together like dolphins. Kevin was such a fast swimmer! I had to get in the water! I swam and swam but as I approached the city I could begin to feel parts of the bridge underfoot, metal and grating, and the other swimmers started to feel it too, and then there was a kind of water riot, we were all approaching/swimming to the shore too quickly and arriving at once and the bridge underwater freaking us out simultaneously. We were scrambling and pushing to get out, the people behind us were like a wave, we had to crawl out of the water quickly, our time was over, ‘they’ were going to let loose some crickets to swim in the bay next. Crickets were the next round of swimmers. These crickets were going to collect, during their swim, information in their bodies about what is wrong with the water.

I dreamt that I was in the white house library with Michelle Obama. With beautiful stained glass windows and antique towering bookshelves all around us (more library of congressesque but somehow more intimate). We sat at a small tea table reciting poetry. I spilt my tea all over the books we were looking at. She was like, don't worry, this library is stocked with left of the center poetics!

At a strange party where I knew no one, I felt responsible for an unhappy little girl who tried to slip out the door when someone came or went. Twice I caught her just in time. I knew it was dangerous for her to go out, because there had been an unusually high tide — I had just returned from the beach myself, and it was wet all the way to the cliffs. The sand was juicy, very difficult to walk on, and strewn with sea life.

I worried about making a mess on the short blue carpet with my shoes. But when I looked down I noticed the shoes weren't mine, and weren't even wet. They were someone's old black tennis shoes, which I thought I remembered seeing somewhere — in an entryway, or airing out on someone's front step.

The girl was about four years old and had short blond hair. She never spoke. To keep her entertained, I turned myself into a rocking chair and rocked back and forth on my back while she sat on my chest. Somehow, though, the rocking motion moved us across the room, and I bumped my head against the wall — and then, suddenly, I was alone on a city sidewalk, surrounded by tall buildings, standing outside a glass door next to an alley. In simple white lettering on the glass, it said "2-H." Through the glass I could see stairs.

With a key I was surprised to find I had, I unlocked a familiar door and let myself into a stale vestibule. Directly ahead of me was another door with glass in the upper half that was too smoky to see through. I unlocked it with the same key and found myself in another vestibule, faced with another door, which I also unlocked. Another vestibule. Two more doors, two more vestibules — but these were larger, and could almost pass as rooms. Wood floors. In the last vestibule, there was a cot to one side, neatly made with an old wool blanket. The window in the next door was covered by a shade. I peeled it away, only to find another shade, which I also peeled away, only to find another. Finally, I came to the glass itself and looked through it. The door led outside. I opened it and was met by an enormous black cat that was eager to get in. But when it looked up at me, it was afraid of me and it retreated. Then I heard voices behind me. When the cat heard them, it mustered its courage, dashed through the door, and disappeared. I closed the door.

Einstein & Nietzsche

I am rambling through Auckland with a poet whose work I have read and admire but whom I have never actually met. We are companionable and a bit excited as we leave behind the great white neo-classic monstrance of the Museum on the hill and go down through the Domain towards the city. I remember the way we used to walk when I was a student here in the 1970s and so we leave the path and head down that wide green slope between the trees towards Grafton Road. It’s much more overgrown than it was then and there’s a woman or perhaps two women going the same way as us—I call out a greeting to her and she replies, reminding us of how in those days you’d see through the trees flashes of the beaut long coloured dresses hippie girls wore. My new friend the poet is taking me out to dinner, or perhaps just taking me out … we arrive at a house that is somehow set over the campus but I can’t understand how this can be. We sit on built-in window seats before a built-in table, as if on a ship, and then I feel a wave of recognition go over me. I know this place. I get up from the table and walk towards the western end of the room to look out the windows towards the city. Yes! I’m elated. I go back to rejoin the poet and say: I have sat in this seat a thousand times before! It’s either a house I used to know on Constitution Hill or else it’s 56 Grafton Road where I lived twice in the 1972, once upstairs, once downstairs, with a gap in between. Or a combination of both houses. The poet has ordered food and I know it will be delicious. While we are waiting we meet two white cats in residence here, their names are Opus One and Opus Two. Then I see a book on the floor at my feet, with a plain cover upon which is written: Einstein & Nietzsche. What a brilliant idea for a book I think. I pick it up. It is tall and narrow but, as I open it, shrinks in my hands to the dimensions of a packet of yellow Zig Zag cigarette papers, the ones with a picture of a Zouave on the front. I’m completely unphased: this is brilliant marketing as well, to imagine a book designed in this way. And after all, I think, listening to the dry susurrus of onion skin paper rustling as I leaf through the book, Einstein and Nietzsche were contemporaries weren’t they? If only briefly. I wake up wishing I had that book on my bedside table. That the poet and I really had gone out to eat. And that I had a white cat called Opus One.

I dreamed that my husband died. I felt responsible.

Wanda Coleman at Harriet

I thought it very considerate when the melancholy friend of my father's uncle arrived with a tall narrow cardboard box full of fruit — especially since he had gone to the trouble of drawing a map on the box indicating the colors and degree of ripeness of the varieties inside. The box was about three feet by five feet, and less than a foot deep. I thought it should be placed flat on its back, but our friend said politely in an Armenian accent that it must remain upright.

Only then, because I could barely hear him, did I realize we were in a noisy mall. Glancing at the box again, I saw that his nice map had been reduced to a mish-mash of curved arrows with conspicuous black points — kind of an imploding diagram.

With some effort, I finally found us an empty place to sit. But at the last second, someone stepped in and removed the chairs. And so we crouched near a brick wall. Our friend fell silent. I felt responsible. We looked at each other for a long time, then he apologized and said he thought he should go. I said, "What a shame. We hardly ever see each other." Trying to be nice, he blamed it on the noise. "You're right," I said. "We shouldn't have to shout." Immediately the place became quiet. He relaxed, and much to my relief we began to talk in earnest. I stood up and raised a baton: of its own accord, it started following the sound of his voice.

At the far end of a busy dining car, a friend I haven't seen for twenty years is holding a pint glass of beer, his arms resting atop the dark leather cushion of his seat as he takes pleasure in the activity around him. He doesn't see me. I start toward him, but am awakened by the movement of the train.

Dreamovie 67

The sky is big and blue, cloudless, and we are traveling under it and on the open ocean in an Airstream trailer. And we are not in the only one. There are others of us sailing as far from land as we can. A some pre-determined point, our trailer, which propel themselves forward without towing, dive into the water and settle on the floor of the ocean, all of the trailers daisychained together so that we can move between one trailer and another. The trailers are wide and spacious, consisting primarily of one great room that includes an open kitchen and living room. These rooms sit between two walls that are nothing but windows that look over the seafloor, which is very much like a rolling valley floor and bright with filtered sunlight. The one complaint in this little world is that the heat is not on in my trailer, so I decide we should leave the compound.

We return to dry land, where I soon find myself in a meeting in a basement room at work. Suzanne is talking about the loneliness of getting a PhD. For some reason, this is an issue at work, and I explain that I understand and am trying to figure out a solution to it.

From this point, we start to discuss the streets of Chicago, which is apparently the city we are in at the moment. Someone notes that there is one major street in Chicago that is more than two miles from any other major street. As that person speaks, I can see that street before and below me, but soon I am driving a car down that very street. I am driving with my friend Dess, who lives near Chicago and used to work there. We are sitting at light and I don't know which way to go. If I go straight, I will enter a highway; if I veer to the right, I will go under an overpass. I keep asking Dees which way to go, but he doesn't answer until the light changes to green. At that point, I go straight, but suddenly going straight also sends me under that overpass and I start searching for a parking space there, though I don't know the reason I am parking. The parking lot is crowded with cars, but I finally find a spot, right next to a gap in the parking spaces, a gap at the bottom of a giant wooden staircase. As I park, some people in a car coming towards the space from the opposite direction tell me they wanted that space. I lock the car, and Dees and I walk away.

Back at my house, my real house, I am preparing a check to mail off overseas, probably to pay for a publication of some kind, but I am not at all sure.

Out the window of my kitchen, I can see a woman who is living at the unsteady top of a tall tree. We could speak to her from the window, but we know we are supposed to climb up the tree to speak to her. A heavy man appears on a branch near her--a branch that could never hold his weight--and he walks gingerly across that branch to her. He seems to have stepped off another nearby tree onto that branch. He is trying to discover her secret. When it is clear she will not tell him, he leaps off the branch, towards a pine tree, wraps his arms around the pine tree, and begins to slide down the tree. I mention to Nancy that I would never do anything like that because he is now traveling too fast. Just before the man disappears from our view, three men dressed like Secret Service agents (wearing sunglasses and with earpieces in their ears) pursue him.

The mail arrives for the day, and there is already a response from that foreign country I had sent a note and check to only today. In the envelope is my note, my totally blank (even unsigned) check, a slip of advertising, and a thin self-addressed but unstamped airmail envelope I am supposed to use to return the completed check. I wonder how the mail can move so quickly over the surface of the earth.

One piece of mail is a large heavy package, which I open slowly, first turning up one corner of the box to see what is stored in that location. We can see the package is from someone we don't know but that it was somehow transferred through a real estate agent in Tennessee that we know my sister Kathy knows. I begin to remove the little items that are stored within the square holes the interior of the box is divided into (much like a liquor box): little white cups like sake cups, then a set of silverware with handles made out of two separate rods of metal bent into a U patter. We already have plenty of utensils and we don't need a partial set of them, so Nancy says we should donate the silverware to get it out of the house. I find within the box a poem that begins, "O, Ariadne." A Cretan in a crate?

A soldier dressed in fatigues appears in the kitchen and we know he is the sender of this package. He talks to us and then takes us out to his car which is a special tank designed for one person to live in. It includes a window to the outside, so it is not designed for combat. It is crowded with controls. As he talks to us about his home, a disembodied voice, maybe a recording, begins to explain the policies that govern what notes a soldier may retain after leaving service. We hear that they can keep most of their notes and journals, but not the journal they are required to keep, which is called My President, My Sweetie. This journal is supposed to include notes about facts about combat that could be important in developing responses to changes in a war or or about other military facts that could support improvements in national security. As I look at this notebook it seemes to be designed to hold long cigarettes in small tubular channels (designed like some pencil cases), so I wonder, just as the alarm rings, if he has to roll his notes into paper tubes and slip them into these channels.

I was sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup behind a car in someone's driveway when I heard voices singing Christmas music. Then several eager-looking high school kids, all with dark skin and wearing glasses with heavy black rims, started passing by on the sidewalk. The first few didn't notice me, but then one did, and she walked back to where I was standing and offered me a very weathered looking piece of chocolate from a small box that contained mostly empty wrappers. I thought she was trying to sell the candy. After feeling my pockets, I apologized, saying, "I'm sorry, I don't have any money. You should have asked me before Christmas." And she said, "Oh, you're right. We should have thought of that." Then she looked at me, and kept on looking at me, and her expression was one of profound sympathy. Soon I was surrounded by other members of her group, and they too were looking at me in the same way. Their gaze was so intense that I thought they must be from another world. Then, without warning, the scene suddenly shifted, and I was swimming in the air not far above a green grassy field. There were trees here and there, and a small empty ditch lined with concrete zigzagged through the landscape. I landed softly on my feet. I was met by a kid who used to live down the street from us. He said, "I used to be someone else."

Dreamovie 66

I am in a building that is situated on a little island of land within the confines of a traffic circle. Andy R has a number of books out within his living space there, and I notice two copies of a book. The book is a hardback, with a deep purple dustjacket, and it is my selected poems, but I've never seen it before. It was created without my knowing it by Bob Grumman and released a few years ago. I flip through the pages and recognize some of my poems, but one set within the book consists of handwritten visual poems with dramatical flourishes coming out of the tops of each character, and I know immediately that I never created any of those. I want Andy to give me one of his copies, but he doesn't offer to, so I leave. I plan to contact Bob Grumman about this.

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.

Dreamovie 64

I am dressing for a party that is somehow connected to a conference of archivists I am attending. I attend the party but forget everything else about it.

*


I drive out to a less populated part of town. Once I make it there, I review a contract for some archival work. After reading the contract, I need to check the prices of particular foods I ate at a diner nearby. Tim and I return there to check the prices. Standing by the cash register, we cannot get around a knot of people to see the posted menu, so we hop on the counter and scoot to the end, where we can see the menu on the wall. The man at the cash register complains about our doing this, and we apologize to the customers, noting that we didn't realize doing this would be a problem (which we did not since this was a dream). Once we review the menu, we leave by another door, the one that doesn't take us past the cash register. Once I return to where I was, I receive a note from my client explaining that my per diem has risen—which, essentially, negated my need to check the food prices.

*



Tim is flying something like a kite out by the sea. He holds a wooden handle that has an elastic cord tied to the middle of it. The cord works backwards than expected. Tim stands on the ground and I pull on the cord from high above him and the cord doesn't snap back to him. Instead, it rises into the air, and once it does the rubbery fingers at the end of the cord (the equivalent of the kite in kite-flying) float away. The first time he does this somehow by himself, and the kite flies hundreds of feet up in the air. We think it will float away, but it doesn't; it floats slowly back down to him.

Tim is still learning to drive and he is practicing by driving Nancy and me around, and he drives us into a city and even parallel parks the car. We then walk across a small park looking for a restaurant. The first one we find is in a public building. The restaurant's doors are open, but it is definitely closed. No-one is in the restaurant and there is no equipment in it at all: no tables or chairs, no ovens or stoves, no utensils, just the shell of a restaurant. We leave the building and notice that the entry we are leaving through is overgrown with weeds and otherwise in decrepit shape. I notice, however, that the structure of the entrance to this building is much like buildings at Boston University (though this is not literally true), and I tell this to Nancy and Tim.

On the way back to the car, we pass a building that looks something like a boathouse, though it is in the middle of the quad in this university. We enter the large double doors and see that there is an oarless and tholeless rowboat resting in the water. We realize that this boat is designed to take people on a short ride over an underground river, so we board the boat. Instantly, the boat begins to move slowly down the river, but suddenly a wall appears, with water flowing over it as in a waterfall. The boat somehow lurches up that wall of water, until it is standing at a 90-degree angle. We stabilize ourselves in the boat as it then tilts starboard and falls back into the underground river. Each of us is fine, since we held on tightly and the boat neither capsized nor took on much water.

Once the boat's rocking subsides, we debark and leave the boathouse. Immediately, I begin to write down what has happened to us, so I won't forget this. In my dream, I see only that particular experience as the dream, and that dream is the one I am trying not to forget. I remember nothing else that happens later in my dream.


Dreamovie 65

I enter a facility where the people inside cannot be trusted and are working against the goals of my compatriots. Inside, it is white, the color of evil in a futuristic movie, the color of unnaturally complete hygiene. Two friends and I move through the building, among the people, unimpeded. No-one seems to see us as outsiders. We assume we are safe. A companion and I have to climb into a small pod about five feet off the floor. This pod will transport us to our next destination. There is nothing to fear. We enter the while pod and latch the hatch behind us. We don't buckle ourselves in, and there appears to be no way to do that. We are not concerned. The pod begins to move, to shake, and it fills with a fine fog. We are jostled about, but not hurt. We are not worried, though we are a little concerned. As we travel, I realize that my friend is disappearing. I have left one friend behind and this one is now gone, disappeared into the mist. The pod stops moving.

*

I have received a piece of mailart from an artist I know, but he had delivered it to me by using a key I have given him to let himself into my house. Nancy is worried about this and talks to me about the problem with giving someone a key to our house. I talk to her with a device in my right ear as I'm climbing down the well to retrieve another copy of the key. The well is inside our house and quite wide, and I am climbing down carefully, holding onto rocks as I go. I am not worried about the key because the man gave it back, but I realize he could have made a copy of it. The well is so large and famous that it has a name. It is known as Proctor's well.

I do not know if I have retrieved the key, but I am now reviewing the piece of mailart the artist had left for me in my home. Part of the piece of art includes a little booklet that once included peel-away postage stamps. I carefully tear the covers off the booklet, so I can use them as postcards. The pages left within the booklet are thin and include little slices within them that allow people to peel the stamps off. I fold one of these pages into thirds and wonder if the page is too delicate to reuse as a postcard and mail.

*

A woman I know named M is visiting Nancy's and my house, which is a compound with multiple buildings and quite a bit of land. M is quite open with us about the fact that she is in the middle of an affair and waiting for her lover to meet her at our compound. We do not know why she has come her to meet this man, but (for some unknown reason) we try to help her. First, I open the door to our giant wooden gates so that the man will be able to see her, but I realize that this will hardly allow him much opportunity to see her. Next, I open our double gates, which are about twenty feet tall and forty feet across and made out of redwood.

As I begin to open these huge gates, I worry that our dachshunds might get loose. I go in search of them, so I can put them inside the house. I find them, but they run away into the fields. I get in a car and drive away to find the dogs. I find a dog with most of its body inside the earth, fighting to pull something out. For a second, I think it is a dachshund, but I see the dog is too large to be one.

I get out of the car to see what the dog is doing, and it has stuck its head not down a hold it dug into the earth but in a manhole. I cannot see what it is pulling. It suddenly jumps into the drainage system. I look down in the hole and I see nothing. Then the dog appears for a second with a tin can in its mouth. In another second, it disappears.

After watching Time Bandits last night I dreamt 80 year old Katherine Helmond had an affair with my boyfriend, and I wasn't mad because she was so beautiful and weird.

I was alone in the country, waiting for a ride in the dirt and weeds beside a narrow road under a cloudy sky, when I was approached by two very intelligent looking boys in their early teens. Their hair was dark, and the eyes of the boy closest to me were unusually bright and large. After we had exchanged greetings, they told me how much they hated school. I asked them if they would be interested in reading books together instead of going to school. They both loved the idea. I said the books could be on any subject, and that we could talk about them or not talk about them — whatever they liked, whatever they felt like doing. And then, suddenly, music began to play — something wild and raucous, with shouted lyrics that I immediately recognized. It was Auden: From bad lands, where eggs are small and dear, / Climbing to worse by a stonier / Track, when all are spent, we hear it — the right song / For the wrong time of year. And although I knew it was Auden, I told the boys it was T.S. Eliot. They had both heard of Eliot, and were quite pleased. But I was not pleased, because I had given them the wrong name. And I thought, I wonder if they will want to read poetry?