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

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

Walking in dreams I sometimes
looking over my shoulder shouting empathy
across the sea, the surf subtles sparsely
across suggestions of “Have I been here already?
Is that already happening?” before
awake alert I glance sidelong only to find her hanging along.

A wordless progression
of images and photographs


pick up a leaf
reveal a face
hidden beneath

see the sky
a stream

a fern
a cloud

reach inside

surprised
to find

my hand again

I had a weird dream that I met Sylvia Plath in some underground cave of water and she was showing me how to get to some land.

The Dream-weeping willows

The yellow car stopped at the entrance of my house and someone opened the passenger’s door without stepping out. I saw the glimpse of a brown hand, spotless edge of a white sleeve and gold cufflinks with insignia of dragons embossed on it. I waved a goodbye to them and with joyful strides set out towards the waiting car. My haversack felt empty as I laid it on the back seat. Hollowed and pulpy, as if I have dropped everything on the way. I pressed on the black leather in panic and heard a whoosh of air escaping from the half open zipper. He smiled at me and said nothing.

I looked back at them, for one last glimpse and final wave, but there was no house, no door. I saw a row of weeping willows, yellowing in the autumn sun. Beyond that was a mossy, black wall and they were sitting on it. Laughing, jeering faces. Their lips made a perfect ‘O’ and they waved their arms at me wildly, in unison. Go…just go!

The road ahead was wet and gray, undulating like a writhing, black snake. The walls at both side of the road was broken down and painted with a parched yellow color. Suddenly it rose, higher and higher as the car sped on the empty road.

‘Will we reach on time?’ I asked his rigid profile.

‘We will reach.’ His voice was ricocheting against the whirr of the engine. I tried to hold on to the edges of my seat but there was water everywhere. No safety belt, just water. Rippling, raging, rising waves and my hands just scoured at the angry bubbles without holding on to anything. The sharp and cold currents were gnawing at my fingers and I found my side of the car caving slowly into a sidewalk quagmire.

I looked at him and he was still looking ahead. Moving the steering wheel furiously, with one hand. ‘Stop.’ I said but I didn’t hear my voice. I said it again but the sound did not come out. My lips moved, gasping for air, like the mouth of a fish left out on the dry shingles. No sound came out still. I reached over to shake him, pull out the key from ignition, but he was not there. The seat was empty. The car had stopped and it was sinking into the squishy ground at my side. I opened the door of the car and swam through the yellow waters of a muddy river. The sun was beating down, scorching my skin, as I looked up at the dry vacant sky. The yellowing walls at the side of the road were turning into willows again, and I ran on the hot, dry tarmac. My feet were hurting as it hit the concrete surface. He was chasing me now. His gold cufflinks glinting in the sharp sunrays as he waved at me to stop.

I ran and ran and getting inside a bathroom locked myself in. the bathroom was freshly painted in bright pink color and a white plastic bucket was put upside down on the floor. He was sitting on the bucket removing his cuff links.

‘I can’t seem to get rid of these.’ He spoke to me and I nodded.

In the corner of a yard I didn’t recognize, my father was raking leaves by a wooden fence. The leaves were old and rotten and piled deep. There was a small tree trunk nearby that I thought should be removed. I told my son it would be easy to dig out. But when we walked around it, the other side was massive. I said, “What happened? This tree looks like it’s 300 years old.” Two words, then, died on my lips: “petrified” and “sycamore.” My father, meanwhile, had found another area under some bushes that needed raking. I could tell by his movements that he was angry about something. He quickly finished the area and went to the front yard. We followed him. The sun was up in the backyard, but in the front it was still mostly dark. My father disappeared behind some bushes near the foundation. Again, he started raking. A neat row of leaves appeared on the lawn. Then, silence. My father was gone.

I dreamed I had traveled overseas for the next International Autobiographical and Biographical Association conference (IABA). I was on a bus traveling to my hotel in Morocco, where the conference was to be held. I travelled with my friend, Christina. When the conductor came to us I had no money for my ticket and needed to borrow a pound from her. Christina was gracious in lending her money but I felt dreadful (she could ill afford it) and I determined that I should not forget to repay her.

Next I am in a queue of people led by the conference organiser, Margaretta Jolly. She has a clipboard under her arm and seems officious as we weave our way through long corridors in the Moroccan university (which looks for all the world like any university I have even been inside in Australia – the same dull grey office chairs and desks) en route to the conference room. So far I do not recognise a soul and I feel sadly out of place.

We reach a sort of dead end in the form of a large room with windows. The only way out beyond the door through which we came is through the windows. Margaretta makes her way through one of them with a couple of others but a university caretaker stops the rest of us. We must not travel through university windows this way, he says. In order to get to the conference room we must backtrack part way along from where we have come and then turn down another corridor.

Eventually we reach the room, three quarters full of people already. For a while I sit down with Millie M and her husband. I am surprised to see them here. This is an IABA conference, not a psychotherapy one. We chat. Millie is eating from a plate piled high with what I imagine to be Moroccan food, couscous, and some sort of exotic dips, fruits and nuts. She is friendly but I sense an awkwardness, whether in her or me, and I am glad to get away.

I sit beside a woman whom I have never seen before. She does not wear a nametag. Nor do I, I realise, and wonder whether it would not in fact be helpful for all of us to wear such tags. The woman introduces herself. She spells out her name, which she says so quickly that I cannot catch on to the letters: L.E.U… or some such thing.

‘I am a professional atheist,’ the woman says. She has a look on her face as if she expects me to be impressed by these words, whether positively or negatively. She has said this to people before and clearly gets a reaction every time.

I am impressed, but before I can say more the conference begins. Margaretta starts off a discussion about autobiography and various people speak. When it comes to my turn I respond to the story of the woman who spoke before me. She had been telling the audience about how she had spent her last two years of school in a Catholic convent as a boarder. She had won a scholarship. Somehow her story seemed to be packed into a box of Vita Brits. I could see the half packed box on the stage in front of me. I started to speak about my own reservations about priests.

‘I do not like priests, ‘I said, no longer confident. I realised as soon as I had said this that my audience disapproved – furrowed brows, cross faces. There were priests in the audience perhaps. I had spoken out of turn. I tried as hard as I could to backtrack.

‘It’s not the people I dislike,’ I said. ‘It’s the position.’

But it was too late. I rattled on then about something to do with my own childhood when someone sitting nearby called out to me,

‘What’s your point?’ I tried desperately to find one, to bring my comment back to the story of the previous speaker, and to wind up my words. The conversation went on then with other people taking their turns to speak. I looked around the room indignant. I wanted to go home, to leave this large group. I felt such a failure. This is an IABA conference but none of these people are autobiographers. They are historians and people from memory studies, literary critics and the like. I am an autobiographer and they hate me for it.

The telephone rang and I woke up.

A snippet of a dream. I went to a supermarket, one of those small IGA types where the corridors are narrow and dark and some of the things high up on the shelves look as though they have been there for a long time, well past their used-by dates.

I was looking in the toothpaste section for a substance I could use on my gums. My fifteen-year-old daughter who wears braces on her teeth uses something like this whenever her braces are adjusted to stop the freshly realigned wires from digging into the sides of her cheeks. I was delighted when I found the stuff in a form I had not seen before –cylindrical sticks of what appeared to be a clear resin like substance. They reminded me of the glue sticks my children use in their glue guns.

I selected the largest pack, which contained about eight sticks and made my way to the register. There were already two women there, one of whom kept leaving her place at the counter and rushing back into the corridors in search of more groceries. The cashier had decided to serve her first, which seemed unfair to me because I sensed the other woman had been there longer and besides the first woman was holding everything up.

The second woman, waiting her turn, exuded that anxiety I often feel when I rush through the shopping. She said nothing but I could feel it in her body language. She was in a hurry. Impatience poured from her pores but if the cashier registered this she did nothing about it. I felt relieved that for once I was not in a hurry.

My memory of the dream peters out here and I am left with a vague sense that it took forever for the two women to be served. I had entered the supermarket in daylight, by the time I walked out night had descended.

Last night I dreamed:

There's a devil statue in my attic. A man approached me and offered his help to get rid of it, but I had to be careful because the devil statue could hear everything I said. Then I became suspicious that maybe the man was trying to trick me to get close to the statue. 3 people I know (1 poet/writer, a past co-worker of mine and one of Chris') were trying to build a machine to wake up the devil statue. I tried to stop them. I tried to hide parts they were using to build the machine. But it was no use. They were gonna wake up the devil.

I dreamt I was defending The Kindly Ones to three people who didn’t understand it. I gave a long, eloquently worded exposition of the book, putting particular stress on the chapter called “Air” – I woke up as I was in mid-sentence, discussing Genet and Bataille. As I woke up I thought to myself, Good grief, I have to defend it in my dreams even…

The night before I finished translating a 500-page sentence I dreamt I saw the last page and was devastated to see that the sentence came to an end three paragraphs before the actual end of the book. All that effort wasted, I thought. I saw the page very clearly in the dream: the long sentence coming to an abrupt end, and then three paragraphs full of short sentences after it. I woke up with a feeling of dread, which was eased when I saw that that was not actually the case: the sentence continued its sustained breathlessness to the very end of the book.

I had a dream that I was in Paris and carrying the book around. I went into J Crew (yes, in Paris) and gave them my credit card - I think you had to get a credit card to get in there. My card was bad, so they said, 'we'll have to take your book away.' I FREAKED out and ran out of the store. It was raining and my book got wet. This is the third dream 'in which I was a poet' in two weeks. I also dreamt that Eileen Myles was my boss at the Department of Education and that I was trying to write a poem like Mei Mei Berssenbrugge writes a poem - with collage pieces all over the table.

I don’t know why, but every few weeks or months, I dream that I’ve either forgotten to prune the vines and trees on our old family farm, or that it’s late in the season and I’ve fallen far behind. It happened again last night. First I thought I’d better prune the vines by the road so the place wouldn’t look like it had been abandoned. Then I remembered the apricots, and the next thing I knew, I was near the top of a ladder putting the finishing touches on a tree with a pair of long-handled shears. When I climbed back down, it was summer and I was in a park, trying to figure out how to prune the various trees and shrubs growing alongside a quiet residential street. Someone I couldn’t see said, “Maybe you should ask the doctor.” And I said, “What would the doctor know about pruning shrubs?” Then there arose the scent of dampness and mold, and I said, “Soon I will find the graves.”

I woke from this dream in the middle of the night and I thought I must write it down now, but I could not bear to revive the dream through the writing. I wanted to get back to sleep and escape the images that would not leave my mind.

We were in a room, a group of us. I was there with my daughters. We had been kidnapped at knifepoint. One had been taken aside. Our captors had chopped off her hands and feet and trussed her into a white shroud. She lay there like an amputated mummy, alive still, but silent. In the dream I noticed that there was no blood seeping from her open wounds and I wondered about her pain.

Two of our captors, the leaders, decided to leave us in the care of the others. They went off in search of food and slammed the door behind them. They had been careless. They left a rifle stretched out along a table. It reminded me of all the rifles I have seen in television movies since I was a child.

I knew what to do. Grab the rifle and point it outwards. Pull the trigger.

By the time I had it in my hands and had shoved it in the direction of one of my captors the trigger had gone off. The one in my sights did a sort of jog before landing on her feet. Somehow I had missed.

In a split second I had them all there at my attention. My captors were now my prisoners but in that same split second I realised there were no more bullets left in my rifle.

Did they know this? They seemed uncertain. They hesitated. They slunk back into their chairs.

I called to my off-sider, my daughter, to get hold of their guns. My off-sider, my baby daughter gathered them as I stood, my heart racing, and wondered when and if I would be yet again put to the test.

If I fired a shot would they see that I had no bullets left in my rifle, or was I mistaken? There were bullets: One tug on the trigger, followed by a loud blast, blood all over the walls and murder on my hands.

I am in a brightly lit white room with a few other people. One of them is a Gypsy man, maybe in his early 40s, who looks and feels very familiar to me - where do I know him from? First I'm speaking with someone else, but aware of his presence because he seems to be watching me. Them I'm suddenly speaking with him - how did that happen? I tell him that I, too, have Romani ancestry, through my birth father's lineage. Upon telling him this, it dawns on me that he IS one of my ancestors. A sudden glint in his eye tells me that he's aware of my recognition of who he is (as if he's been waiting for me to catch on). Now I'm aware that I'm dreaming. He holds up his right hand to give me a high five. As soon as our palms touch, he clasps my hand firmly in his, and I jolt awake.

Chris' 'healing hands' are successfully realigning people's backs. He realigns poets' backs, poets who I believe have lost their way, poets who I feel have hurt me. They all suffered serious back pain, but with a few deft adjustments, Chris fixes that. I make a joke that these poets should pay him homage--that Poet 1 should draw him as a statue with a very large penis and Poet 2 should give him a golden cow. Chris tells me he's a little tired. In addition to the poets, he also realigned 15 other people's backs during his walk on the beach this morning.

I’m expected to announce the winners of the class election and post it on the blackboard. As I try to go over the names in my mind I know I won’t remember them, but I can’t take this seriously. I have an oversize cup of coffee that’s spilling and full of grounds. Some young kids show me the sink which is huge and cumbersome. When I turn around a fight has broken out between two boys, but then I realize it’s a play fight.

This is the best time of the day for writing and yet I feel I can’t use it. I fear I can’t use it because I have that empty disinterested feel that I sometimes get when everything that comes to mind seems trivial and scarcely worth writing about. This is the blank page syndrome. I suspect there are many who when confronted with the single page might wait and wait, might fiddle with words. This happened in my dream now as I come to think of it. I was at a meeting with university types, including Klaus N. Klaus was involved in talking about history and the past. At one stage I noticed a writing friend, working at her desk alone. On a sheet of paper I saw that she had written down seemingly random words. She then played with each word in turn, words like ‘loosely’. Something about the ‘oo’ letters led on to other words containing such letters.

I wish I could remember now the sense my friend made of her words because in the dream I knew she was working to create new ideas. I tried myself later in my dream to do something similar, but my ideas seemed prosaic. Somehow I was stuck at the surface of words, their sound, and their shape. I could not fathom deeper meanings no matter how hard I tried. The emotional tone in my dream was one of sadness; the left out experience that comes from not feeling as though you belong. Desperately I wanted to belong and to impress but it was not working and I sat at my desk trying to stretch meaning out of words that would not oblige me, while the other people, engaged in conversation, walked on by.

I had a bad dream. Very gory. Some kind of murder investigation. I was in a huge barn-like structure, dark wood, wide open rooms, barn-like floors. I was maybe four stories up. It was some kind of camp. There were cots lining the walls. And in the cots were the corpses of slain people, all young, in their early 20s, brutally murdered by being stabbed or cut. So many. Horribly sad. Then we found the person who had committed the murders: a young man, also in his early 20s. Before he could be arrested he threw a large black computer keypad into a swimming pool that was now somehow in the middle of the room. Then he jumped in. He electrocuted himself.

This morning I dreamt that I was waiting to be sworn in to my new job as a congressman and while trying to remember the oath, I was mildly embarrassed to realize that I wasn’t quite acquainted with a particular issue that I should have been speaking out on.

I dream endlessly of a man who lives alone and finds himself persecuted by the presence of uninvited people whom he know to be mirages – ghosts. He orders them out. He throws things at them, but still they arrive, men and women, all types, ordinary people as well, but they are not invited and he is slowly driven mad.

Then I am at the university. I want to make contact with Joan from my writing class. ‘Old Joan,’ I want to say, because Joan must now be nearly eighty. I wander around the University of Melbourne from my youth. There are pieces of plaster left sticking out from a position on the wall upstairs and I stand in front with another girl trying to prise them off. We watch them fall to the ground. I know that these traces of plaster are part of an experiment, a research project to establish the fate of this plaster – will it fall of its own accord, will students pick it off, or will it stay?

We prise it all off, large shards of concrete and watch it fall, worried that it might hit someone below. It does not. By the time we have scraped the wall clean and walk away, I hear one of the nuns, the reverend Mother say to her colleague,

‘We hope the students leave one wall intact’.

It is too late. We have peeled the concrete lumps off both walls.

This dream reminds me of Italy, the land of render. Two weeks ago as my husband and I walked through the town of Teolo we watched workmen repair walls. They mixed a red brown paste pitted with bits of broken tile to fill the holes they had unearthed behind a layer of render, presumably peeled back because of rising damp. Then they rendered over the lot in white plaster.

To me, this could be a metaphor on life.

Dear Tig:

I had a dream about you last night. Peter and I came out to visit you in Arizona, and the land was covered in wildflowers. We hopped in the back of an old pickup truck and drove around looking at all the colors. Then we spent a lot of time collecting flowers and stripping the petals off to make heaps of petals on a white enamel counter. Oh, and I did your dishes.

Of late musicians and artists appear in my dreams.

I sat in the humble mountain home of cool and kind Carlos Santana, listening to him play and tell of the heirlooms about him. Notably a silver flute. Not tarnished, but old. Creamy soft. His grand or even great-grandfather's flute.

The flute was wrapped in a heavy alpaca knit sweater, and in the body of the flute were markings. Secret markings. Triangles. Numbers. 19.18.17.11, scribed in triangles on the plate near the thumb rest. The numbers woven into the warp and weft of the sweater now used to protect the flute. Magically, the plate opened to reveal the markings more clearly.

I was told by Carlos that it represented a Mexican tradition (which he named and I thought I recognized the word from life, but could not repeat it now, if my life depended on it). The tradition I was told was that his grandmother, or great grandmother, as the case may be, had knit the sweater as a gift to accompany the grandson, providing comfort for the departing man as he headed off to live in the world. A gift of appreciation for the comfort and protection she had received from the grandson.

Yes we talked of guitars, but memories were blown in the flute's happy breath. Oosh 'bgoosh.

I needed only to tie a ribbon around a nice flat box from a department store, but the lid came off, the box fell from the table, and the contents shattered on the floor. In that brief moment, the table turned into one of the old wooden trailers my father and I used in the vineyard on our farm many years ago. The trailer was covered with things that have been in our family for ages. Some were broken, others were oddly distorted. There was one wrinkled envelope on which my mother had written, as a reminder to herself, that my father had died. I started putting the bits and pieces into a brown paper grocery bag.

Last night’s dream parade included: Renny Pritikin, a suggestion from me that we didn’t need the big room we had built for video editing because the software made all the decks redundant, photographing buildings on fire at night, traveling from Sweden to Finland, a zombie dream so frightening that I woke from it and refused to go back to sleep except that it part of another dream, some fight with people during an urban breakdown like a riot, David Deitcher, helping him locate a display case for an exhibition he was the curator of, becoming interested in working with etching plates, attempting a few monoprints regretting that I hadn’t looked through all the books I saw for sale next door because of the ideas they would have given me for drawings, trying to get my burning building pictures into the Chronicle, because its offices were nearby.

Dreamed that a friend of mine bought a house where the Obamas were temporarily living with their three children (they had a new baby boy). The house was painted a kind of oxidized copper color, and was near an ocean. The house was designed to have a partly open space inside like a kind of dock beneath which water from the ocean was flowing. The water was full of life: a strange creature I was calling a “skate” although it wasn’t a skate, but some kind of camouflage-y, leaf-resembling fish that stayed upright on the water like a little sail (it “skated”), and any number of jellyfish, octopi, and other creatures that looked like microscopic organisms blown up very large… and all of these were biolumimnescent. Trippy! I remember some of the details of the house’s interior: a kind of patchwork of linoleum and hexagonal bathroom-style tiles on the kitchen/ entranceway floor, a little corner shelf made of decorative Italian tiles, but very old, everything old, unmatched, in yellowed tones. Old hardware on the kitchen cabinets, lucite with little flowers, I think, and circular, like those I saw recently in a neighbor’s house, apparently the same ones Louis Armstrong had in his house in Queens Anyway I kept going back in the dream to look at the water space and all of the life forms that moved around in it.

#1

I was tied naked to a stake
in a gawd-for-saken land
way out "there"
the sun was blazing hot

and circling me a- hooten and a-hoolerin'
was a band of (also) naked Indian women-girls


#2

I am falling head first down down down a tube..
I can see a light wayyyyyy down there...
then suddenly POW!
I egress from the dark-dank tube

into the light and just drift endlessly away

I'm at a cocktail reception (dinner to follow) in a gathering place with a big floor-to-ceiling front window. The Jackson family is there, milling around, and I'm talking to Janet. Despite their world-wide notoriety they seem very friendly and down-to-earth, though a bit distracted. When it's time for dinner I end up sitting next to Michael, but the name on his seating card is "Brian Jeffrey" (or "Jeffries"). He's very charming, but shy and uncomfortable. After dinner he disappears and everyone is worried, looking for him. I lose interest in their search and drift off. A few days later my sister Toni shows me two telephone messages she wrote down for me while I was out: one is from someone who's supposed to be my dead boyfriend Arnie (or maybe Woody Allen -- ??) and the other is from "Brian"/Michael. These notes were written on the back of a small piece of paper torn from a tiny notebook -- I almost missed them. Brian's note is a message about a big party he's inviting me to, but it's not until "12/14" (at first I think it's "1/14"). Toni's note says " . . . he said there'll be poets and musicians there, and he thinks you'll really like it." He's left a number, but I won't call him — calling will make it seem like I like him or something — I'll just show up.

Dream in 3 Successive Parts:

I was eating a bowl of small pink peony petals (conceptually peony, but blown rosebud looking), slightly browning at the edges so they HAD to be eaten. Like cereal. Out of my green/blue handmade bowl. I wondered why it wasn't a more popular breakfast food.

Then a cavernous cement-floored shop with a Grand National body up on jackstands waiting to restored.

Then my father asked me the rules to a game I never heard of. "Can't you explain it to an old man like me?" But I didn't know what he was talking about. Felt very sad.

Dream I go into a room where there are maybe five guys who look like figures from Aztec cartoon drawings. Some of them are maybe animals. Each one is bodypainted a different kind of metal: oxidize d copper, bronze, etc. Each one has some kind of magic jewelry that, when they put it on, acts as a torture device. Two of them argue about whether they have any volition or not about whether the jewelry will torture them. One says, I’ve been painting? eating? it all my life.

This morning I dreamed I was getting ready for work. I was applying
lipstick, Cherry Cola, an actual lipstick I had when I was a girl, and
matching eye shadow, and my lipstick wasn't exactly right so I put
another color on top and all the while I was humming Mozart's horn
concerto K.412. Then I got dressed in a red skirt and black stockings,
and a red blouse and red shoes, and a short red wool coat and a red
beret still humming the horn concerto, and I was happy in this ritual
but I was late I was late for my bus, I knew I was going to be late for
work. I picked up a pile of books and held them close to my chest and
ran outside, and I was in New Orleans or Paris because the street was
full of open outdoor markets except for an unusual handrail all the way
down the street which was polished wood with knobs-the kind of knobs
you'd hang a short red coat on, and I was running and humming the horn
concerto and it started to snow, and my feet were slipping in the snow
(my shoes were small red flats), and I realized I was going the wrong
direction away from my bus instead of toward it, so I turned and ran
back down the street, snow coming down even harder, humming Mozart the
whole time happy to be inside of Mozart inside of my dream, and thinking
how fine the red wool coat was, and tasting the Cherry Cola lipstick,
but a little anxious to be late for work.

Just dreamed that the New York Times this morning, instead of having "New York Times" at the top of the front page, had "THROWS WHITE SPACE AWAY"

broadway junction


i had this dream last night

broadway junction

she spoke to me

her language

was these strange

whirs and whines

she asked me

if we would burn her down

she wanted to be ashes

i told her

yes

i told her

i'm sorry honey

i asked her

if

when she's all ashes

if we could retrieve

her stained glass

pieces

and wear them

as our halos

she said

sure

as i got off the train

she said

one more thing

kendra,

tell eric

i always loved

him

I imagine that I am still living in NYC but have no place to stay, so I will sleep in hotel rooms as long as I can afford it. I know of a hotel in Queens that's relatively cheap, but my intention to head in that direction is deflected by someone (a total stranger?) who tells me that as long as I'm getting involved with hotels there's one in Midtown Manhattan I simply must visit. This person tells me that there are events that occur on the first floor or the basement levels that are very dramatic and are of astonishing phsyical beauty. However, if I walk into the hotel, it is better that I not seek to view the events directly; rather I should enter one of the rooms on the floors above--each room has a shaft with an open top attached to one of its walls, rising only to the height of an average human, and you can peer down the shaft to the hotel's bottom, though obviously you could also throw down small objects.

I manage to sneak into the hotel and enter an un-occupied room. Despite the fact that the hotel is so expensive for those who actually pay, the room looks comfortable but not particularly fancy. When I enter it is evening, and I want to take a nap; somehow the matter of seeing the once-in-a-lifetime spectacles below is not on my mind at this time, nor at any later time in the dream. I do nap for a short time, and then observe my suitcase on a table, with some of the clothes that were within it removed and placed neatly beside it. However, I do not remember opening the suitcase and taking out any of the clothes.

I discover that I am still tired, and decide to take another little nap. When I wake up it morning. I am quite panicked, because somehow I assume that with the sun up it will be harder to walk out of the hotel with no questions asked than it would have been in the middle of the night. I gaze wistfully out of the window of my fourth or fifth story room, pondering the possiblity that when I take the elevator down to the ground level I could bypass the front desk and find a back door that I could walk through inconspiciously. I gaze into a round mirror that stands upon another table in the room, and everything about my face is unsurprising except that what heretofore had been the whites of my eyes were now shiny silver.

Last night I dreamed that I was in a large lecture hall. A snooty, old-school, literary expert took the podium. He was somehow connected to Richard Howard. The literary expert looked around the room and decided it was too crowded so he read a list of names of poets and magazines who had to leave. They were all from smaller, less prestigious magazines.

After those poets left disappointed, a late-to-arrive poet tried to enter the lecture hall. The booted poets were gathered around the door, hoping to overhear the lecture. They told her she couldn't come in. The tardy poet interrupted the literary expert and asked for an exception.

I was furious. I stood up and said that there were plenty of chairs, everyone should be allowed to come back. Other poets in the room agreed with me.

The literary expert asked who I was -- I said I was the Paris Review.

On the second day I stayed home because it was the same speaker and I had quite enough. Gideon came home early with a note from school saying that they wanted him to be evaluated for 5 days because they believed there was something emotionally wrong with him. He flipped out at the 2nd lecture and attacked his classmates. I asked him if he did this and he admitted it. The note instructed me to call the counselor, "Zachariah," for the evaluation.

I was concerned. I understood his rage at the literary expert, I felt it too, but I didn't understand why he attacked his peers. His anger was misdirected. He should have bum rushed the podium.

christopher rizzo's name was gary fox, and he was wearing a suit where we wondered off to talk in his car then returned. later at a cafe' in kingston ny. i looked through beads on a table. lee ann brown was on the phone in the chair next to me, planning a boat trip with ( i realized) anne gorrick. lee ann didn't know who i was. she laughed about the fact that they were going to do a gas called B___ene (Benedrene?) on the boat. lee ann left after hanging up. k came back in, and we laughed about it. on the way out, i pocketed a bead.

We were in a grassy area next to a stream. The grass was so vibrant green it had a blue aura, how I imagine Tennessee to be. We were shy with each other at first. You barely looked at me but when you did it was with the same telling eyes as always. I could tell what you wanted to know and it didn't take me long to spill it. "You know I'm in love with you, right?" You melted a little at this. You were happy to hear that it's real. I was happy to see you standing your ground, not running away like I always imagined you would do. "I want to get to know you better," I followed. Ease. We can be friends.

At a dangerous turn in the river, a raft loaded with farm animals hits a snag. Several fall off — sheep, pigs, goats, cows — and are swept into the current. The air is filled with heartrending cries. Those still on board jump in the water after them. One, however, a large tan-colored pig with black spots, calmly climbs ashore and starts foraging in someone’s brightly colored vegetable garden. The pig doesn’t notice when the others slip beneath the surface.

1. It takes the form of a documentary. Recently, lots of people having been getting red lights shone in their faces. Just going about their normal business, then their face is illuminated a bright red. Investigators have tried to find the source of the light, but to no avail. It happens indoors and outdoors. There have been sightings of a large, red light source in the clouds.
   
   
2. I am in a comfortable beige study. Leather, sepia, oak. I am sitting on a comfortable chair and am petting a young polar bear. It is biting and scratching me (painfully). As I play with its white fur I notice the skin underneath is completely black.
   
   
3. I am trekking in the Himalayas. It feels like Tibet. There is a large group of us and we walk single file on the suggested path of rocks. It is very sunny. Our guide tells us that we are to climb a natural stairway - "Only 20 meters!" We climb and I am third up. There is a building and a stone doorway with a tiny hole at the base - the first two have gone through the hole. I know I cannot go through the hole, so I step around the doorway. It was free-standing anyway. The residents of the building welcome us. The others hand over a stone as a gift. I hand them a terracotta pot / waterbowl that I had picked up ealier and carried with me. I have put a stone in it as well.

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

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

This weekend I dreamed of an archeological dig (and deciding to homeschool Gideon so I could bring him along), speaking on who gets away with making butt thumbing threats, having to answer questions on religion when buying plane tickets, not being able to speak because my mouth is full of hard & sticky gum, separate tables, a Turkish beach vacation, pictures in my bikini from that vacation being posted on the Harriet blog, a man's sex reassignment surgery, knitting and iguanas.

For the first time in my dreaming half century underworld
there it was
a Monarch Butterfly.
yes ever flapping this first butterfly
a sight bringing me toward the surface
still i remained smiling asleep

I’m in a strange house with strange rooms oddly juxtaposed.
Doors are where they shouldn’t be; some open onto walls.
I ask the carpenter why this is so.
Muscular and old, he answers with a smile.

Now we’re outside, walking through an old industrial area.
I see trucks; workmen; the smudged rear windows of warehouses.

The carpenter is no longer a carpenter.
His work apron is gone.
Now he’s a madman with twinkling eyes.

Who knows what he knows.

My grandmother’s uncle was upset that no one recognized him. I touched him gently, affectionately, on the side of his face. His angry expression melted away. He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was still very old, but he was himself again.

I dreamed that some woman was combing my hair, digging the comb into my scalp. It hurt, and hair was being yanked out in huge clumps.

Running down a gentle slope scattered with old dry oaks, dodging circular bolts of lighting thrown by someone whose smile tells me he’s just having fun. The one aimed at my head wakes me up.

Last night I dreamed I was in Italy sitting around a table with a group of Australian friends, all of whom we had met by chance in the streets of Italy or at the beach.
‘You can almost guarantee running into someone you know,’ I heard one woman say to her companion.
‘It’s ridiculous to travel so far away and there they are, all your friends. May as well not leave home at all.’

I sat opposite old friends, Dianna and Roger. I had not seen them for years. In the dream they appeared just as they were when I knew them best over twenty years ago. Roger was still darkhaired and sprightly, Dianna, a couple of years older, still trim and fit. Dianna was nursing their daughter, who is now in her mid twenties, but in my dream Ingrid was still a small child of less than two. Dianna was stroking her cheek. There were other old friends and acquaintances, mostly those we had met through our years of contact with Chris and Suzie.

Earlier at another dinner in my dream Chris and Suzie and their two children were sitting at a table with Suzy’s elderly father. I knew that Suzie needed to help her father regularly to the toilet.

I was not happy to be there. They seemed such a wowserish family. Here we were in Italy and they were not even drinking wine with their meal. They were all on water, which is uncharacteristic of Chris.

Their daughter poured Bill and I a glass of wine from a Chianti bottle. Even though I was grateful for the wine I was annoyed that she had not at least asked whether we preferred wine or water. I did not like her making the choice for me.

I had with me a gold embossed Easter egg that opened up into some sort of container. In it I had stored my partial denture and some play dough from among Leo’s toys. Suzie took it from me curious about the shape of the egg. Her father then took it from her and before I knew it he had opened the egg and its contents went missing. I was furious. How could I sit at this table a front tooth missing and still have conversation? I wanted to leave.

We queued up for food at a huge bain-marie and again Chris and Suzie’s daughter poured Bill and I another glass of wine, while the others stayed on the water. Then Bill and I were roaming through the streets of Italy. Somehow Bill had managed to take his leave, even before the main course had been served and although I was glad to be away from them, I felt guilty to have not stayed at least till the end of the meal.

dream about tornadoes (recurrent) again last night.

The Mountain Lake

My dream begins with a short afternoon hike in the Catskill Mountains - a walk, really, since I am on a wide road like path with a moderate incline. I am accompanied by a young black male who seems to be a friend, though I don’t really know who he is. As we walk we share conversation and a joint of good marijuana, becoming quite high and happy. Eventually we reach a lookout point that provides a nice view of the surrounding mountains. At this point my friend seems to vanish and is replaced by several other people who I apparently know. I tell them about the rest of the trail to the top of the mountain we’re on and we agree to return the following day for the complete hike, arranging for an early start. Another short walk brings us to a small mountain lake surrounded by grassy lawns and picnic tables. I remark to the people I’m with that the water is quite cold and deep. As I walk along the shoreline I stumble and fall into the lake and begin to sink rapidly toward the bottom. I am suddenly aware that I have objects in both of my hands - a rock sculpture of some sort in one and my father’s old boy scout bugle in the other. I am reluctant to release the bugle, but realize that I must or I will drown. As soon as I resurface after releasing these objects I yell “Shit!” and start swimming toward shore, for I am suddenly in the middle of the lake. It is at this point that I realize that the people who are with me have changed. Gone are those who have accompanied me on my walk. They have been replaced by my cousin, his wife, and their teenaged son. All three have jumped into the lake to save me, but are now swimming along beside me. My cousin finds a shallow spot - a submerged rock shelf, and stands up as the rest of us continue to swim. I am not looking where I am going and bump into a young woman on an inflatable rubber raft. All around us are lily pads. The dream concludes as I approach the shore. A troop of girl scouts are having a picnic nearby and are unaware of what has been happening.

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

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

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

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

My dreams last night came in snatches.

Ella, my daughter was a small child, not herself as I know her, but in the form of Benjamin from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a wizened up aged child. She lived in her room upstairs alone. I say she but she had an androgynous quality as if neither male nor female, neither old nor young, and she was lonely. I had managed to find her a puppy with whom she could play but for some reason this puppy did not stay and again my Benjamin Ella character was sad and lonely.

I was travelling in some foreign land with my husband and another of my daughters. My husband raced ahead as he often does and we were left to pull on our own resources without a map. We spent time in a large department store. I did not want to buy anything, only to look. Somehow the trip had gone wrong and I was bored. And worried about how we might spend the rest of our time.

My dreams merged here and I was back with Ella Benjamin. An old woman, proprietor of a large shopping centre, had said that Ella Benjamin could look after her puppy as she herself did not have time to manage it. Ella Benjamin was delighted.

One day later the woman came to visit. Ella Benjamin and the puppy were playing in the mad crazy manic way that puppies do, rolling and tumbling over one another. The puppy snapped at Ella Benjamin’s hands. The woman was horrified at the sight of this and slapped them both, forcing them apart.

‘He’s only a puppy,’ I said.

‘He needs discipline’, she said.

I woke up.

. . . dreamed that I called myself "Luke" after receiving a distress message from the princess on Obi Wan's TV. There was no time to waste. They were going to use the drug on her in the morning. Obi Wan agreed to help. First we stopped at a pharmacy to speak to a Hippowoman who knew of the place where the princess was being held. The Hippowoman delivered drugs to this zoo/military space facility. We had to be careful, her bosses were watching. Then Obi Wan and I spoke with the family of someone I went to high school with. I introduced myself as Luke but later in the conversation after they told me about the dead baby I admitted that I was known to them as Rebecca. But I didn't feel comfortable telling them about why I was now "Luke" or my mission. It seemed too weird to share, just like earlier in that dream when I crossed the street wearing a bikini and high boots. So goofy and exposed, no good explanation. I had trouble keeping it together after I learned of the baby. "They'll just have to try again" the mother said. It didn't seem that easy to me.

Two disjointed dream fragments:

1) A handsome woman with long black hair streaked with gray and tied back stands before a wash basin. She kneads a garment in the water, then gathers it up in her hands and holds it high above her head, wringing it out. The water cascades into the basin as she intones "ay de mi - los dolores son hechos de manchas..."

2) A woman is seated on a low, three-legged wooden stool, surrounded by 6 other women in an asymmetrical grouping, variously kneeling in front of and beside, and standing behind her. They are in a darkened room, and eerily illuminated from an unseen source. The scene looks theatrical, though it's not theater, and I'm simply witnessing rather than participating. The woman on the stool sings a lament, and the others join in the chorus. It is plaintive and beautiful. I don't remember the words - it might have been in another language.

Just a few nights ago, I had one of these reoccuring dreams where I’m chased by the authorities. What my alleged crime was, I have no idea. Late in the dream, I seek cover in a queen-sized bed that’s set right in the middle of the street. Actually, there’s two of us, but what happens between the sheets, let’s not go there. Anyway, the pressure becomes almost unbearable, until suddenly, I find the perfect escape. Call it poetic justice, or not, but I know I can get rid of my pursuers just like that–by waking up.

I had a dream that I had no ceiling. Above my bathroom there was nothing -- no plaster, no wood, no moulding, no tile. It was rotted. It was a black puddle above my shower. I was worried that other people would think it was gross.

I have a dream where I am with my family when suddenly, the ground begins to shake and rumble. We all start running. There is an alien invasion, and the aliens are these huge, metal spheres that roll over the Earth and destroy whatever is in their path. They don't exactly chase humans, but they do roll through more populated areas. My family runs and runs and runs. We head towards the coastal cliffs. We run through scaffolding of the side of the cliff, that presumably the aliens would not attack. We keep going, the thing rolls by and keeps rolling.

We meet up with some other people and go into this beautiful, coastal house with our community. Under the house, the group has built an extensive network of underground tunnels, with windows that open up in the cliff so that we can get light. You might not even know you're underground. We wait in the house until we hear that distant rumbling, and then run downstairs to the underground portion. The thing rolls over the house, destroying it, but we are all safe underground.

There is no way we can figure out to destroy the things yet, as they are extremely tough, metal spheres and we Earthlings don't know their weakness yet--but there is always a weakness.

We start hanging out in the beautiful underground house.

Last night I dreamt that it all made sense. Everything I did and said that night that I am now so ashamed of took on ordinary, understandable meanings. My words became innocent and well all laughed.

And then I came up with the idea for Fear Factor.

I dreamed I was on my way to school. Chris called to tell me that it was going to rain and I should change my pants. I told him to forget it, I was already late for school. I was late for homeroom, I considered going straight to my first period, but knew if I did that I'd be marked absent. On the stairs there were some handicapped students being helped up the stairs, they were moving slowly, so I went down the hall to take another set to my homeroom on the third floor. On the second floor I walked past an office. Inside was Joe Biden dressed as a judge.

The next dream was about Rebecca Loudon's 3 cats. A dominant male was beating on Paris the Genius cat. I told somebody to open the closet and make sure she wasn't trapped inside. It turns out, she had been.

I dream this some time ago. I dream that I have a bike, it's blue, it's a good quality bike, and it's too tall for me.

It's mine though. I ride it around campus. I'm free on my bike, and I'm empowered.

I lock the bike up--I attach it to one of the bike racks on one of the streets that border the quads.

I want to tell you that I've ridden my bike that's too big for me--that I ride it all the time--because I know you'd be proud of me that I've finally learned how to ride a bike. I'm proud of me.

But in the dream, as in life, we aren't talking.

I don't have the key to unlock the bike from the rack. And a part of it gets stolen.

I'm too small for the bike anyway.

I have moved into my new home in Ottawa. The house is huge, with interiors defined by flat, glaring white surfaces. Every room is tinged with a cold, clinical blue. The house exudes loneliness. I move through hallways and a bedroom and see two sets of sliding closets, unimaginatively placed parallel to each other.

I move to other parts of the house and see that it belongs to O's family; I’m their guest. The knowledge doesn’t lift my spirits—they’re not my favorite people. With the knowledge that this giant house is for a family of four, the spaces seem bigger than ever. I walk down a wide, white hallway to peer into O’s room. The king-sized bed is rumpled with toys and possessions tossed about. Objects—too much material wealth—litter the floor.

In another part of the house I see her younger brother. Small and nerdy, sporting oversized glasses with brightly colored rims—the trendy kind—he sits before a super-sized computer, eyes fixed on the screen. One hand deftly navigating the mouse, a vapid smile on his face, he is learning Chinese. As the words scroll by, he selects the characters he needs extra help with remembering, or that are otherwise important. The computer talks to him as he engages in this expedited process of learning. I see an unfair advantage at work.

I move to a workshop or display center, where Uncle L shows off the fancy centerpieces he has made. This is his hobby. Although he thinks of these items as high art, they actually look just like the expensive, pointless home décor sold in bourgeois chain stores such as Pottery Barn. As a form of appreciation for my looking at his art, he presents one of the centerpieces to me as a gift. It is one of the more boring-colored of the pieces. He could have at least given me a brightly-colored one.

Last night I dreamt that I was a virgin princess, and I was captured by three gods: the dragon, the dirt, and the dark. The dragon, the dirt, and the emptiness. The dragon, the emptiness and the grave. They were in competition with each other over me—it was a game for them, who could keep me, who could capture me from the one who had kept me. I flew on the back of the dragon, red scales and muscles flexing under me, until the emptiness pulled me away. The emptiness flaunted me until the dragon swooped in and took me back. Back and forth, back and forth, each taunting the other with his prize, just wanting the game to continue. And then we were in some building and I don’t remember who had me, but the dirt snuck in and the dirt grabbed me and pulled me along behind him down the stairwell, down and down and the dragon couldn’t follow and the emptiness was left behind, down and down until we were in a dirt basement, and I could not get back up and there was water running down the walls and there were rats and crawling things and the dirt did not even pay attention to me there, just tossed me to the floor and I cried and I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to get out. And somehow I managed to send a message to the dragon and the emptiness, to let them know where I was, so they could come and save me. And somehow I managed to get out and they took me again.

And I realized, I am in love with the emptiness and the dragon. I love their game. I love riding through the sky on the dragon’s back. I love the feeling of the emptiness enclosing me. I am in love with them. I do not want the dirt. I do not want the grave.

Except, later on the grave decides to woo me. He whispers look at this bed I have laid for you, and the other two will never notice and just come with me for a little while. And I am cautious; I don’t trust him, but I think that after just a little while, I will go back. And so I say yes. Take me away with you. Yes.

The dream I had last night must have been detailed, but I only remember one moment, and that’s the part right before I woke up. I don’t remember where I was, and I don’t remember if I was even myself, but whoever was conscious in the dream pointed out a very large, caterpillar-looking insect. It was about five inches long with furry spikes along its back, and I believe it was white. The last few moments of my dream involved this caterpillar finding another insect and killing it, taking it in its jaws and crushing it. A voice in my head said, “Why does he do that?”

There was a terrible apocalypse that made everyone's money sticky and no one could get their money out of the ATMs anymore. It had something to do with an anarchic, communal effort to pour maple syrup into the machines. Since apocalypses require one to make quick decisions, I had to make a split second choice about whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life indoors (in a building like the art deco American Airlines hangar at La Guardia Airport, the building with that beautiful font) or outdoors. I couldn't find Peter, so I had to make a choice that I thought he'd make so we could find each other. I choose the "indoor" option, and when I moved indoors, I could see his face pressed up against the other side of the glass. I made the wrong choice. So I begged and begged the "indoor" leaders to let Peter join us indoors, and they gave in to me. But when I ran up to meet him, I realized it wasn't Peter. It was someone impersonating my husband to get indoors and that again, I fucked up.

Last night I dreamed that I returned to high school after a mysterious absence. In the cafeteria a bully girl sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She wouldn't. So I picked her up and slammed her against another table. I held her down and dared her to free herself. She couldn't. She told me that I was "insanely strong" and I added that I was very angry too.

I dreamt that Ron Silliman had ended one of his blog posts with the words, "My weird."

My first night back home I dreamed the following things: funny-shaped pills, driving to many cities, a cheer/dance routine performed to a poem, a poet complaining about his sex life, a party, a mall, looking for a toilet in a salon and senseless murder.

I had a pleasant dream about Bill Luoma last night. Bill was going through my pile of books to get rid of, asking about the poems I planned to read last night. He had really good recall of poems of mine that were similar to but (in my mind) not as good as the poems I had intended to read. In my dream, I gave him the logic book that I have not yet given him in real life (Naive Causal Modeling, volume 1), and I talked to him about the advantages of backwards causation (part of the book argues the possibility of backwards causation, i.e. the idea that things I do today might have caused past events). I argued that backwards causation might enable Bill to change elements of his past life if he wanted to, by triggering backwards causation with his actions today, but Bill thought any past events he might be causing today had already happened and thus were unchangeable. But I said that meant that the effects would be determining the cause which is impossible. . .

In my dream Bill was using a baseball bat like a walking stick and spent a lot of time pausing to think. When he did speak I often felt surprised by what he said, and I had to think about how to respond to it. I guess this is my impression of Bill: soft-spoken, casual (not causal!) in affect, but deep, as if when you say something to Bill it takes a long time to float down through his attention, but when it's fully registered he comes back with an incisive but very light response. I'm always interested in conversation dreams which show me my internal models of other people, which are mostly about a mixture of gesture, timing, and tone. It's interesting to think of having these simple models of other people's way of presenting in one's own head--I wonder to what extent these models get triggered when doing, for example, email?

Very complex dream last night, in which many past events of my life had happened differently/been substituted for. In general, the main difference was that I hadn’t moved to LA in Summer of 2003 (when I married Tova). Instead, as I realized while chatting with my old friend Phil Poulter, I taught at MCC in Texas (which had been vastly expanded, to the size of a university) where I was exploited during the Spring 2003 semester by being given only one class [this is a reference to how I was treated in NYC that semester at John Jay College of Criminal Justice—I was cut down to one class which damaged my economic prospects in the city] and further exploited (in the dreamlife, at dreamMCC) by being forced to edit the student newspaper for free, in return for a chance to teach more classes in the future. I kept running into my students from the 03 dream-semester, smart, affluent, mostly Asian (dreamMCC had demographics more like UCI than central Texas, and I think the students from the “dreamclass” referred to the students in my Art of Poetry class at UCI in Spring 2001—probably the single class I have most enjoyed teaching, to naturally thrilling results (I won an award!)—the sort of class that I feel like my friends with PhDs and “real” teaching jobs have the chance to teach all the time.

In the dream I had had to more or less write the student newspaper myself, with help from a handful of kids in my “dreamclass” (which was just a comp. class) and it had been short, naturally. I had been dragooned into doing it because the person whose job it was had been on leave, maybe pregnancy leave (a reference to how I filled in for a teacher on pregnancy leave in Fall 2003 at Cypress College, where I was also poorly treated [classes cancelled in summer 2004]—interesting how the referential dates revolve around Summer 2003). In the “dreampresent” the student paper was huge and done by students. It occurs to me that dream MCC represented all the community colleges (since MCC was the first one), and Phil represented all the colleague-friends from the community colleges (since he was the first and best one).

Then found myself at the Martin house conversing with Phil P and James Sherry. Alcoholic subtext, but not directly mentioned—just that kind of conversation. Someone was puking in the garden. Then found myself in New York City (Williamsburg) for John Ashbery’s wedding [?]. Everyone involved very shy of publicity. Many old southern gentlemen talking about John, comically mock-pompous orations. Teenagers recording everything with camcorders, the tapes from which were meant to be confiscated at the end of the ceremony, but some of the parents of the teenagers [poor relations!] plot to sneak out with tapes to tell to the tabloids. So, a confidential wedding and it’s unclear who the other groom and/or bride was, so also a one-man wedding. There is a lovely circle-dance of teenagers pointing camcorders as they spin. It ends with confusion, as there’s a general effort to confiscate tapes, poor relations screaming and crying as the tapes [negotiable memories] are pulled away from them. I am the poor relations of course, as much as [no, more than!] I am Ashbery. I would like to be Ashbery, which is different.

After the wedding, I start driving home but have drunk too much and lose control of my car in a small tree-lined neighborhood just north of Williamsburg [very funny—suburb with lawns where Bed-Stuy should be]. I crash the car in a yard. I get out, and find my head is bleeding. I know if the police catch me I’ll get a DUI so I decide to walk home. I have to walk with no shirt on because I’m using my shirt to collect blood from my head. I go into the backyard of a suburban house and find an outdoor pantry from which I take a bottle of water. I worry that I’ll get punished no matter what I do next, because the crashed car is evidence against me, but on the other hand if I’m sober when they see me who’s to say I was drunk when I crashed. (The answer is, the wedding guests will narc on me.) So I walk and find a small southern-style convenience station, the sort you’d find where one one-lane highway intersects another, with a Bubba type dude inside. He doesn’t care I’ve got no shirt on and a bleeding head. I ask for directions to the train but he doesn’t know shit. Then I walk out and some tourists point me to the train. It’s the train to Manhattan (where apparently I live). I find a backpack on my back, put on a shirt for the train, find my head has stopped bleeding and my vision has cleared, and off I go. It’s actually the 1/9 train (misplaced, and of course the 9 train is discontinued now).

Dream seems to reference my comments on “backward causation” on my blog yesterday, the idea of changing one’s life through a natural, unnoticed process of backwards causation where actions today cause events in the past to unfold differently until there you are in a different present—my dream runs with this [nerdy] idea of an unstable continuum.

"Why on earth are we painting the walls stark white?" This is what I'm thinking as I dip my roller in the paint and slather it on the wall before me. I'm wearing a long, cream-colored silk wraparound skirt printed with pale pastel flowers. It occurs to me that this is the wrong garb for painting, since it will probably get ruined by paint drips. There's another woman here, painting the wall adjacent to mine - a stunning, slender black woman with a large afro. We both dip and roll without saying a word. At the exact same moment, as if by design, we both set down our rollers and step back to assess our work. I'm still thinking how boring it is to paint the walls white. Suddenly the other woman shakes her head violently, and a rain of bright purple paint flies out of her hair, landing in big splotches on me, on the walls, everywhere. We look at each other and laugh.

The hand that touched my elbow was cold, and felt clammy. I turned to look back in panic. It was perhaps my startled reaction and the expression of alarm on my face which brought a sudden, amused smile upon the face of the person I found standing before me. The features of that face were like a sketch from a distant past, his right hand was covered with a white bandage…and it looked a bit dirty. I forced my mind to recollect where I had seen the face. It was like those drawings one made as children, where the trick is to keep moving the pencil chronologically on the dots till a face is formed on the paper. I stood on the sidewalk, trying to recognize that face, feeling fuzzy brained. The person, who was standing before me, kept smiling all the while, watching my confusion. Not helping, not speaking at all. Just smiling mildly. The drops of rain fell in a soft spray on him, wetting his hair and clothes, but it did not seem to bother him.

He just stood on the pavement. Smiling. Involuntarily, I extended my umbrella towards him; to save him from the rain, and to my sudden, absolute horror, I saw the face and the form disappear. It appeared as if he was dissolved in the pouring rain. I was holding out the umbrella in an empty space. Few passers by gave me vague looks and I pulled the umbrella back, feeling foolish and scared. My heart was beating hard. I could feel the pulse throbbing in my temples, inside my throat and behind my eyes. In my half awake state I saw the raindrops roll down my window pane.

A casual swim begins in calm, blue waters. First I’m alone. Then I hear others laughing and splashing. The waters expand. In the distance there’s a small rocky island. I start swimming toward the island, but then a breeze comes up and the current pulls me off course toward a cliff. At the edge of the cliff is a black road; beyond and far below is where the ocean begins. A fog settles in. I feel a sense of panic. Then it lifts and somehow I can see under it and over it, but not through it. Now the stars are out. I’m walking on the road. I hear my brother’s voice. He and his wife are in a cave with pale walls. They’re waiting for me with a small fire and a meal of bread and cheese and wild greens. Before I take any, I realize that I’m holding a key. When I look up, it’s daylight again and I’m facing a locker on a busy street corner. But before I can open the locker, I have to empty out my mother’s closet. Most of what’s in it is old and stained and doesn’t need to be saved. Then I find a familiar looking towel. I retrieve it for the locker. There’s a field of corn stubble between her closet and the street corner. While I’m crossing it, I see a young woman standing alone, her back turned toward me. She’s been crying. I don’t know who she is or why she’s unhappy. I ask her if I can help. She smiles and says it’s too late. And I think, how strange that we are standing here in a field. How beautiful and lonely and sad everything is.

The other night I dreamed that I went to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. I got my glasses out of my purse so I could see. There were a bunch of hovering objects over her desk. She told me to focus on the pickle and tell her what I saw. Is it improving or getting worse? she asked. The pickle was getting worse, it was blackening. As I contemplated the pickle, I became aware that the pickle represented the masculine.

Dream # 2:

Some of the last words I wrote before coming to this place were "with wings." With or without wings, I now find myself flying over a rugged desert landscape. Make that without wings. I look at my outstretched arms and see that they are indeed arms, not wings. Now they're stretched out to the side, now palm-to-palm in front of me, now held close to my sides. Yes, this is effortless!

Soon I lose interest in how I'm flying and focus on the rapidly changing landscape below. I swoop down low over a boulder field and wonder how it would be if all the rocks were the color of lapis. Instantly they change to a deep, luminous blue. Now I'm flying high over waterways coursing through an emerald forest, now over an ancient city.

I'm suddenly aware of the precariousness of flight. A disembodied voice says "you know, this is a dream." Out loud I say "you know, I can do this in my waking life too," and awaken here.

Dream #1:

I am reading Pedro Páramo, whether the novel or the play I'm not sure. But this much I know: there is an elusive passage that appears and disappears. Sometimes it's there, sometimes not. But it changes something about the book/play, deepens one's understanding of it if one is lucky enough, or maybe astute enough, to catch it. I'm sitting here reading the book/play intently, and Sidney is here in the room with me, sitting in his comfortable chair, waiting to see if I catch the passage. Suddenly I see it, and it's as if a light has lit up in my head. Only now, as I look up from the book in excitement to tell him, he has vanished from his chair, as readily as the passage itself and the ghostly inhabitants of Comala.

Screep, screep, screep - it's 2:11 a.m., and I'm abruptly roused out of the dream when my car alarm suddenly and mysteriously sounds outside.

dreamt that me and Ramsey Lewis were renting rooms from Linda. Linda was an eco-terrorist...her and her girlfriend would rent houses in Contra Costa County, plant forests inside the houses, watch houses be overwhelmed by trees, and mold, and spores, and leaves, caves would form, rooms would crumble, houses totally destroyed, forests began taking over the neighborhood. Ramsey Lewis and i reneged on the rent and got the hell out of there.

Klaus Neumann was in my dream last night. Structurally it was a familiar sort of dream.

I am with a group of people, one of a group, colleagues from work or university and we are planning to meet Klaus for coffee. Somehow our group breaks into smaller subgroups and I become disconnected from them. I am standing alone below a tall building with an overhanging veranda. On the veranda itself I can see one of these subgroups of people playing a game together, maybe darts or ten pin bowls.

Their laughter echoes across the courtyard and I feel left out. I want to join them but cannot figure out how to reach them. In the meantime I am aware of Klaus who is supposed to be meeting us all. I do not want to miss out on seeing him. Across the way I can see another elevated veranda on a separate building and I know that Klaus is there with one or two others. I am jealous of these people. I want to be with Klaus.

In the dream, somehow even without seeing him, I know that Klaus is busy and preoccupied. He has no time for us, least of all for me. This is what I call the structural familiarity of my dream. It frames that old sense of exclusion, of not being wanted. When I wake up, I think in my logical and adult head that it is simply because Klaus has not yet responded to my email of a few days ago. The longer he takes to reply, the more rejected and unwanted I feel. But I must not take it personally.

- dreamt I lost my entire life last night. Even my plants.

Sarah Connor broke into a corporation run by the mob. She is frantically photocopying/printing documents, information from the company that she needs. There's a young male employee with her, a slovenly, slacker-type who's cracking jokes. He does not get the seriousness of the situation. Sarah senses that the terminators are near and tells the employee they need to go. He doesn't understand what's happening so she points to the security monitor. It shows rooms full of dead employees and the mob's heavily armed security forces shooting large machine guns. The security forces are quickly mowed down.

Sarah takes the employee to another room, perhaps a safer one, and continues to print out the documents that she needs.