Obama dream

Obama was in my dream. There were a lot of people staying in a big room somewhere, like a country house, woody, with high ceilings, but I think it was actually "my house." At one point, everyone was sort of sleeping (think of the scene in the Superdome after Katrina), and Gary and I were on the floor in something like a Japanese futon, and my ass was exposed. I didn't think this was unusual but Gary kind of let me know it was inappropriate. So in another "scene" I was hanging out with Obama and he said, "let's find a way you can make some money with that big old computer of yours so you don't have to work so much." He was very friendly and avuncular (which is weird considering he's only two years older than me) and really seemed like he wanted to help me out!

A bone-white demitasse delicately painted, full to the brim with steaming, thick-foamed coffee; and then, the gentle voice of an elderly woman,urging me to wake up and remember.

I had no phone, I had no computer, I had no TV, and yet for the second time, it was necessary for someone from the cable company to come out and restore my service. I explained to the employee that the first time, her co-worker had to crawl into a closet in order to make the repairs. I remembered how difficult that had been, how dark and deep the closet, and how strange it seemed that there was a metal box in there full of wires. Without saying a word, she headed straight for the closet and crawled in. I never saw her again. When I turned around, I saw a cell phone on a small folding table, picked it up, and listened. It was someone from the cable company saying the repairs had been made, and that I should notify them of any trouble. Before I could tell him about the missing employee, the connection went dead. I looked at the closet, but now the door was closed. I decided to leave. On my way out I saw a dark-haired woman on a cot, in some kind of distress. I had no idea who she was. I laid my hand on her face, she looked up at me briefly without recognition, and I continued on. I came to a very large stainless steel door that was closing like an elevator door, sliding from right to left. Beyond it was a large mostly empty warehouse with two or three men moving about, wearing hard hats, shouting, their voices echoing. I pushed the door back a couple of feet but wasn't strong enough to hold it open, so I let it go. I went into an adjacent warehouse instead, down some wide concrete steps of very irregular depth, only twice touching them with my feet. I knew I was being watched, and that I was considered odd for not using the steps in the usual way, but I was too pleased to care. High above, on what I thought must be the eastern wall, light shone in through a dirty window.

A million different colored lights are dancing in the indigo sky above me. Swirling strobes of color surround me as loneliness settles in my heart...my spirit...my mind. I'm tired, scared, and just want to lay down on the cool grass below me but it is wet and I can't stain the white dress they put on my. I'm so cold but I have no jacket. The one I owned wasn't going to match the purity of my gown.

I drift through mist and come upon a tree, whose leaves had fallen leaving it bare and naked. I place my hand on its cold bark. I'm tired. I settle my forehead on the rough tree and sleep.

Eileen Myles, pennsound file

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

I must have slept for 13 hours last night with all sorts of strange dreams about the library computers crashing at peak times (yesterday was a little stressful and draining), weird camping scenarios involving being captured by cannibals, and a strangely erotic dream involving a male poet/blogger/editor I once met at AWP and probably have only talked to one time. But I think I'll go to my grave without saying who...;)

I was on holiday in a Victorian mansion with ocean views from every window. I had to go to the bathroom, & I wandered away from a gathering of people drinking & laughing in a well-lit room to darker hallways. Wallpaper was peeling in the endless cabbage-smelling hallways. I came upon Steve, looking into an aquarium. Well, not really an aquarium, but more of



a wall cutaway & replaced with glass



"This was my nursery" he sd, & inside the now waterfilled room was a small cradle, a changing table, a chest for toys. Two maids were in the display, one seemed to be dusting, the other painting green fireplace bricks white. They moved in aquatic slow motion.



I found the bathroom, but instead of a toilet I peed into a small glass container. It had a chrome lid that lifted with a small leaver. The inside glass had markings, so you could measure liquids. While I was urinating a trapdoor opened beneath me.



I was expecting it


& stepped aside, continuing my pee into the open floor, which turned out to be another tank of blue aquarium water. There were hundreds of eels swimming about & a massive shark swam a the top of the tank. I finished, & .

In an unfamiliar room, I come upon a slide show of old family photos, some in color that shouldn't be, progressing slowly on a large TV screen. And then a blank space, voice only: my father's poet-painter uncle, singing — something I never heard when he was alive.

I'm reading over a prose poem I just finished. It's really wow. I have the perfect title: Seinoira. I print out the poem. The bold, one-word title looks especially beautiful over the block of justified text. But I think it should be "Sayonara." I Google it to make sure. I cross out the title and write in two words. My handwriting is illegible as usual. I correct the spelling in the body of the poem as well. I wake up and I'm awake for real so I head downstairs, power up my Mac, sit down in my squeaky chair. I have a three-line poem called "Sayonara." I hold it in my hands. The first and third lines are longer than the second. It's like an embrace. It might be something. It might be wow. I feel competent as a child screaming out for Mommy wakes me up for real.

Away
by Kimberly Lyons
(pennsound file)

Saying to me, as I woke up: "I do not believe in the fabric that lies underneath the skin." huh?

A light bulb shatters. The backs of strangers, scurrying away like rats. A broom in my hand, dawn, the soup-stained floor of someone else's kitchen . . .

unfcomfortable & strange dreams the past three nights:

1) there is a particular other poet whom I know but not well. awake last week I saw the poet at a restaurant but was stoned & too shy to say hello. this past saturday night I dreamed that the other poet & I had made social plans; I was excited to strike up a friendship. I went to the poet's house which to my surprise was strongly redolent of my neighbors' house from around 10 years old. the other poet was cordial but not warm, & the awkwardness of our interactions, heaped up with my own self-consciousness over same, came to grate. after some hours of rabbity conversation, I stepped outside, frustrated that it hadn't been easier.

2) the next night, sunday, was the most upsetting. I was a part of a loosely-organized military force, a mob or an army detachment, who had captured a particular important family Nikolai-II-style, & were facing down their indignant threats of repercussion. our motive wasn't clear. we were myriad. I wound up in the room where some hundreds of us were confining the (maybe 17-year-old) daughter of the family. she had powerful language but did not frighten us. we were all acting as tho without choice, our cause unclear, & we were distracted by our own unhappiness. finally a notion rippled thru the horde that we'd not need to murder or in any final way punish the girl; she could be released. we were immensely relieved, a flutter of assuagement rippling across the hive. on waking that good feeling was replaced by a horror that lingered & seemed to strain against all yesterday's color.

3) there is a particular woman who hurt my feelings when I was 16, & whose life I visited again when I was 25 & found it hideously conventional (dullness in the name of a career, prefab heritage, fiancee without apparent magics). last night I was walking in a dream on 5th avenue in manhattan (high teens, near the mesa grill) & I spotted this woman at completely impossible distance. I managed to chase her down, & asked for news. she was happily married &, she revealed, pregnant with an odd pregnancy that could only be seen from one direction. she was with her younger sister, whose name I surprisingly remembered. they both had startlingly beautiful hair.

I have a sense that the three are somehow connected; some connections of course are obvious but not, to me, the most interesting ones.

In a shadowy back room I am shown how to use an iPod to record peoples' thoughts/speech. This recording device works rather effectively through walls. Immediately after being shown how to work my recoding device, I suspect the teacher of some form of treachery. I watch my back & attempt to record this shadow, though through all the whiteness of the world I cannot find the teacher again.



I have people I must record, & setting out I wander through a clean, white world; all buildings interiors & exteriors are painfully, blinding, florescent white. & mostly every place is a cafeteria or a department store. I spend most of the dream sneaking through the snowy commercial atmosphere with light elevator music playing in the background.



Upon reviewing my recordings, the subject's face appears on the iPod display screen. I have recorded my mother, & she speaks/thinks in an endless loop of small talk, her tiny head chirping in my pocket.

Anselm Berrigan, Pennsound file

From high on the only shelf in what seems to be a neatly carpeted but abandoned library without walls, I take down a very small, very thick, very old book. The print in the book is the tiniest I've ever seen. Somehow I can read it, but I don't know what it means. Near the front I find a date: 1803. And on the inside cover, there's a price written in pencil: $59.00. There are many other scribbles, but they are too faded and smudged to read. I wish I had the money. . . .

I'm in a small used bookstore. This place I know. I go directly to the poetry section and without even looking I find the same small, thick, old book. This time it costs eight dollars. Then I find two more old books; both are a little larger, and barely holding together. The contents don't really look like poetry; this pleases me, because it proves poetry can look like anything and everything at the same time. I take the books to the desk by the door, behind which the owner is sitting, lost in a book of his own. To my left, I notice many shelves are missing, and that the open space has been transformed into a kind of sitting room, with one old leather chair, a table beside it, and a floor lamp for light. When I ask the owner why he made the change, he looks up and says, "That is a secret." The total price of my books comes to sixteen dollars. I take out my wallet, which is much older and more worn than I remember, and completely empty except for the pleasant surprise of a twenty dollar bill. Without hesitation, I give him the money. I wake up hungry.

I was in an unknown building that seemed to be a school and one of the teachers who I felt questioned my honesty, wouldn’t leave the office although I told him I needed to use the restroom. Then suddenly before I realized what had happened he lunged at me and laying himself face down beside me, put three fingers in my rectum.

I thought he was trying to see if I really needed to use the restroom or if I was just trying to get rid of him. I did want to get rid of him, but now I had proved myself to him concerning my need to use the restroom. I felt ashamed to think that he had invaded my body with his fingers that way, and happy that my body had cooperated with my need to get rid of him.

Many people found out about the incident and they played hurtful jokes on me, like forming a line of cut clumps of hair up to my office door.

After this I became a student in a classroom waiting to receive back a hardbound book with my test scores written inside it. Although my grade was above average, it wasn’t the top grade that I wanted. I couldn’t tell if it was the grade I deserved. There were large notes from the teacher scrawled on the first page. She came up to me asking to meet with me. I agreed and took her up a hill near a fence and began to tell her what had happened to me as if that prior incident would explain a lower grade. For the effect (I think), I sobbed as I tried to tell her about the three-finger lunge.

Eclipse with Object
Ann Lauterbach, Pennsound file

I'm driving a through a deeply furrowed field. The car becomes impossible to manage. I'm stranded at the field's edge. Walking, I come to a door which leads to another field, and several short rows of plants with single stalks about five feet high. Although the leaves are too big and I know I'm fooling myself, I decide the plants are purple basil. I rub the leaves and hold my fingers to my nose; when I find there's no basil smell at all, I feel a deep sense of regret. Then, someone I almost recognize, a man in his fifties, arrives with an old manual lawnmower. He says he will take care of the grass, then pushes his mower, rust-colored blades whirring, through the back door, which is set in a high aluminum wall. I look up. I can't see the roof. I can't see the sky.

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

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

Later, there was a sense of regret.

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

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

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

But they were real and alive.

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

Perhaps they were some kind of genetic experiment.

A writer tells me she has ghosts in her house: the ghosts of large fish are swimming behind her baseboards, making loud thumping noises as they go.

I'm sitting at a long narrow empty table by a window with an old writer-friend of mine who is unusually talkative and has developed the strange habit of fluttering his eyelashes while he speaks. About this time, a cheerful old lady comes up to me and insists on pinning a little ribbon on my lapel. After she leaves, my friend tells me he has a terrible headache. We stand up, but can't leave because the table is too long. So I get down on my hands and knees and say, "Come on, we can go out this way." But when I try crawling out under the table I'm met by a wooden crossbeam that's so low I can't crawl under it. And then, suddenly, there is no table and no friend. I'm walking along a large grassy corridor toward the hut where I've been living when I meet a man talking on a cell phone. It's someone I haven't seen for years, a man who used to run a little neighborhood market with his brother. His shaggy eyebrows are twice the size they used to be, and he is at once very chipper and insincere — to the person he's talking to on the phone, and to me. I greet him without stopping. I reach the hut. Everything's a mess. Someone's been there. I go to the little shelf in the corner to get my friend an aspirin. But instead of the bottle I find a single pill in some spiderwebs, lint, and shavings, so I dust it off the best I can and put it in my pocket. I turn around, only to find that someone has planted two cherry trees while my back is turned. They are straight young trees, with trunks about two inches in diameter, and the dry hard ground around them shows no sign that they have just been planted. Just then, a garbage truck approaches the small opening between the edge of my hut, which no longer has any walls and is now constructed mostly of chicken wire, and the corner of what looks like a backstop on a baseball field. The space is about three feet wide. Somehow, the truck fits. I remember my friend, take the pill out of my pocket, and swallow it.

Images from a troubled sleep . . .

my mother, eighty-six years old,
looking up at me from her bed,
without the strength to rise;

a stranger calling attention
to the whiteness of my beard,
then saying he remembers
when it was blue;

crossing a fallow field,
I'm joined by a friendly dog;

an unfamiliar road traversed
by a caravan of rusty old cars —
someone says, "Oregon or bust,"
but I see only his hands.

I dreamed that I was apprentice to a typesetter.

Together we lived in a huge crumbling mansion across the street from the well-kept mansion of a bishop, or some kind of bishop-like religious figure. He would appear in the early mornings dressed in a red robe and nightcap to collect the papers on his front door.

The typesetter I worked with was potentially a murderer, and the whole building was full of creepy Victorian scientific equipment as well as printing machinery. There was one machine that was like a huge typewriter, but for shapes and flourishes instead of letters. Sometimes a larger version of Lester lived in the house with us, and he looked very very green against the dark gray colors of the print shop.

At one point, the typesetter and I were giving a tour of the shop to someone--perhaps someone who knew that the typesetter was a murderer and was trying to secretly find some evidence. I remember thinking that I would have helped him find the evidence if I knew what it was. At the far corner of the print shop, which was in the huge attic of the mansion, was a door. The typesetter led us through the door and said, "And this is my master suite bedroom." The walls, floor, and ceiling were covered with loose type, and there was loose type rolling about on the floors, unfixed. At the back corner were a series of metallic frames that looked like old bed frames, but were also pieces of type, somehow.

Then my alarm went off, and I got up and ate some high fiber high protein cereal with blueberries.

I was a helicopter
flying over
indigo badminton courts.

Jerome Rothenberg, at PennSound

My father said,
"When 13 opens to 83
you will round a bend
and realize how lucky you are"

I was being tested at the end of the school year on how my drawing skills had improved. The piece of paper I chose to draw on was handmade and full of imperfections but smooth. I had a yellow tinge to it and in places there was almost a faint image of some of what I wanted to draw or I made use of the imperfections as I constructed my image. My line style was scribbly and I used colored pencils to build up subtle color. The forms emerged as I drew and although it was to test architectural rendering, the drawing needed to be dramatic. From an angle, I drew two heads with hats that overlapped each other and I showed all the formal details of the hats as well as the space the figures were in. I worked on it until the last minute and felt pleased with the drawing. A friend walked with me while I turned it in, just in time. She and another friend looked tanned with pretty heads of massive golden red curls.

traum

So I was looking in a notebook of mine, right at the point where Luca Antara ends and the next book begins (don't know what this next book is/was) when it suddenly occurred to me that I'd left something out. The whole episode of Hitler in Adelaide. I made a few notes and then remembered there was a book about it. I'd have to get hold of a copy of that book. The relevant papers were in a low cold flat under a hill. More tunnel than flat. I didn't live there any more but thought I could probably get in. I knew my things would still be there. It's a dream place, I've visited more than a few times over the years. First I dropped in on a couple of friends who live nearby. They are real people who used to like to pretend they're re-incarnations of Robert Graves and Laura Riding. I mentioned the book and he shrugged in that louche way he has and said Of course. He meant there was a copy on their shelves. There at the back of the room. So I didn't have to go to my old flat after all, that was a relief. I'd never been happy there. However I did have to search the shelves ... took a while but I found it. 600 pages long. A kind of straw yellow hard back, large format, crudely made. Co-authored by two sisters, their name, along with Adolf's, was on the spine but I've forgotten it: Droescher maybe? Anyway the focus of my inquiry was on where exactly in Adelaide Hitler had lived and what he did there. There was a fold out map in the front of the book that turned out to be 3D and interactive. I saw the City of Adelaide morph into being, it was a view both top down and from the street. Beautiful. It was Adelaide, I remember how the City is disposed from my only visit there, many years ago now. But this was the business district, he didn't live here but somewhere in the suburbs. Ah, said the voiceless voice that comes to us in dreams, he had a hat shop. Or perhaps he sold caged birds. Something like that. And worked as a jockey. Then I saw Hitler himself, dressed in silks, getting ready to ride in a race. Except his body would not do, it was one of those limbless bloody screaming trunks out of a Francis Bacon painting. We would have to substitute him if we wanted our horse to win. I remember dressing the other jockey, I remember translating Hitler into another realm or dimension so our girl could ride in his place. His post-war refuge in Adelaide did not last long of course. He and the Droescher sisters were soon found out and had to flee further afield. Their book ... who was the publisher? What a rarity it must have been. Unreadable as Mein Kampf no doubt but there are people who have read Mein Kampf. To think I have held it in my hand. As I woke from the dream there was one further image that I carried over into consciousness: in hard, chunky, geometric capitals the legend: HITLER IN ADELAIDE.

Note(s): There’s a crypto-fascist news agency based in Adelaide called Nuca Antara—it is mentioned in passing in my book Luca Antara. Werner Droescher was the name of an anarchist professor of German I knew when I was a student. He had fought with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was married to the writer, Greville Texidor. He had tried to encourage us to form a cell on campus at Auckland University in 1970. The whole question of places that exist in dreams and may be visited again and again over the years is one that perhaps needs further investigation.

In my dream I drove twice from point A to point B. Not only was I able to make the trip in a very short time, but also I was able to take pictures of important landmarks like old churches and falling down barns with my digital camera without even stopping. By the end of the second trip I had become an expert at holding up the camera and shooting on curvy, winding roads without looking at the screen. I had become very familiar with the road. I realized that I got faster on the second trip because I timed myself. My wristwatch showed that on the second time around I made the trip in less than an hour. The only thing is, I have no idea how I ended up twice at point A.

last night i dreamt about surfing and cats

My wife and I were several floors up in a large hospital. The doors to the patients' rooms were all closed, and there were none of the usual sights, sounds, and medical equipment in the corridor. The few people we did see were dressed in regular office clothes. But they didn't see us. When we came to the end of the corridor, my wife went one way and I went another; I had it in my mind that I wanted to go to the seventh floor — the Psych Ward. On the way, the corridor narrowed, then turned, then turned again. More corridors. More turns. Finally, I came to an elevator; it opened and I stepped in, but was disappointed when I realized it was taking me to the ground floor, not the seventh. I got out at the lobby. There were several men and women chatting. "Doctors," I thought. I asked one of them, a man distracted by some papers sticking out of his briefcase, if he could direct me to the Psych Ward. "Oh?" he said. "Is your dog sick? Tell me, what are his symptoms? Depression?" But I didn't have a dog, and I was suddenly very concerned that my wife wouldn't be able to find me. Realizing that the doctor was crazier than I was, I got back into the elevator to look for my wife. More narrow corridors. Signs on the wall at the end of each, pointing somewhere else I didn't want to go.

I am with a female friend/relative/acquaintance (?). She has a tiny red dot on the skin on one of her arms or legs that looks like an insect bite of some kind. She asks me to squeeze it for her because she cannot reach it herself, and it's bothering her.

I squeeze it with my fingernails, but it doesn't seem to have anything in it.

I squeeze it a second time, though, and the red dot grows larger and larger, until it turns into a nipple. Then I squeeze it with my fingernails again, and this time, deep-red cake icing begins to slowly stream out of it in a long stream like a small rope with tiny wavy lines along it. It is just like red icing coming out of a cake decorating bag.

We marvel at this beautiful "red icing"! I quit squeezing when the icing stops flowing. But every time I stop, there is still more inside. I squeeze it about a dozen times until the red icing finally stops coming out. "I feel so much better," she says.

Then -- as if by instinct -- I reach up to feel my chest. One of my breasts is half the size of the other.

Project Dreamway

Dreamed last night I was a contestant on Project Runway. Problem: the instructions were confusing. Maybe there were no instructions. I think the first outfit I made was a very 80s tunic & leggings in black jersey; I decided I hated it and ripped it up, started making a scallopy layered dress out of the same fabric... but then I heard or remembered or realized or something that the judges didn't want to see black, that it wasn't "risky" enough. I was not on the usual set, it was in some half-abandoned institutional building in the country. There was some issue about shitting, I don't remember what it was. But I do remember that one of the other contestants made this amazing Marie-Antoinette style dress out of peacock feathers, and I was trying to do this totally amateur thing in black jersey. It was very anxious-making, this dream.

last night i dreamt that i was skateboarding and then rollerblading at Woodside, and that honey bees were crawling out of Chad Stock's ears, i think honey bees or wasps might be my spirit animal, i also dreamt that i was walking with Joanna Newsom in NYC and that i could leap maybe 15 feet into the air...leaping or running dreams are my version of flying dreams...i'm usually leaping, like Toby McGuire in Spider Man 1 where he's just figuring out his powers leaping from building to building, it feels exactly like it looked like it felt to do that in the movie

i woke up and had strong coffee and listened to Cass McCombs

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



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



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

My brother M and I are sitting crosslegged on a narrow stretch of
sand, both of us on either side of a metal railing. Seated height
embankments flank us. We are in some sort of a community space. I am
telling him about the nature and meaning of something which is
provable by the geography around us. I ask him to focus on the strip
of sand and imagine what the world must have once been like - an
unending expanse of sand.

We notice digging going on some distance away, straight ahead. The
hole is around eight feet in diameter and several feet deep - it is
three quarters filled with water. Somehow this too proves the theory I
have been explaining to him. Though it is M who goes to check out the
hole, I know about its size and water level.

Suddenly a lot of water spurts into the sand. It gets wet and squishy
like sand along the shore on a beach. I want to bury my hands and feet
into it and slop around, but crowds of people appear around us and
seem to be in a hurry to leave. I am a little fazed at the ruckus and
decide to leave as well.

I awoke this morning unable to remember the dream I'd had — until a few minutes later at the kitchen sink, when the vitamin pill I take each morning caught in my throat. I dreamed I had taken an aspirin that was about three-quarters of an inch long, braided, and reddish in color. The aspirin, too, had been hard to swallow, because I had no water. Thank goodness I did when I was awake, or I might have choked to death while looking out the kitchen window at the dry ground under the fir tree behind our house.

Reb Livingston's Dream Poet Anthology

I just had a perfect dream. Or it wasn's perfect, it was a completely logical story and even now seems logical by wide awake standards. So there are four or five of us living together—unrelated and one of the men kills one of the other men and there are neighbors who see something, they don't know what, through a partially opened blind. They invite us over, or me over, and want to know where the dead man is, only they don't know he's dead. Or he's only out. Finally they insist on seeing him. He is actually the person who made the arrangements for their rental. I seem to be the only one who knows about the murder in my own apartment and I finally tell the others, telling them to act like they don't know about the murder. The murderer does not know that the others know. And that is as far as I got.

My arms are still tired from flying. I would have been content to walk, but flight was necessary to avoid several hostile lurking figures, on a street lined with mature leafy trees. Evening. With steady strokes, I lifted myself above them. When they kept pace beneath me and tried to grab my ankles to pull me down, I changed the angle of my arms and flew up higher, just out of reach. Then they were gone, and I was in an old apartment house, opening doors and trying unsuccessfully and not very urgently to call out for help. The rooms were all empty, but I could see they were lived in. Eventually I found a set of stairs and followed them down two flights and into the street — not the same street I had been flying above; this was a busier street, lined with shops. I was joined by my mother (when she was a few years younger and still up and about) and my youngest son. We went into a shop that was familiar. There were lots of books in the shop, especially near the back counter, behind which was a friendly young blond woman we all seemed to know. While she talked with my mother, my son and I looked at the books. Several shelves were devoted entirely to hardcover versions of the Modern Library imprint. I looked back; my mother and the young blond woman were gone. Then I found a rather odd-looking book, newly published, much taller than it was wide, with a very busy and colorful dust jacket that depicted hundreds of people in great commotion — the Revolution, I thought. The book's title was Walt Whitman and Aram Saroyan. And I thought, what a strange, unlikely combination. Whose idea was this? I opened the book; leafing through, I could see some of Whitman's lengthy passages, and a picture of him when he was quite old, wearing a beard much coarser and larger than any I'd ever seen in his other photos. And in the back, there was Saroyan, still in his twenties, reading to an angry crowd. And then suddenly I was in the street again, alone and trying to retrace my steps, wondering at the strange, unrecognizable names on the street signs.

I'm at the Marist Writer's Institute participating in a discussion about publishing. I give my introduction. It's a good introduction. All of a sudden I'm hearing everyone on a five second delay. I'm the only one who seems to be having this problem. I start to panic. Finally _____ says she hears the delay too although she's the only one who admits to it. Then the delay goes away and its back to normal but I start to panic again. I yell "I'm still hooked up to the machine!" People try to calm me, tell me it's OK.

Then I wake and I discover that my head is wired to something, the machine, I suppose. There's little squares attached to my temples. I start to rip the cords off. Lex Luther (from Smallville) is there trying to hook my brain back to the machine. I attack him. Then I see a woman in a pretty dress. I'm angry because we were both promised dresses, but since I was hooked up to the machine, I probably missed my opportunity.

I Dream

About an hour ago, at seven this evening, I had a dream. Yes, i do sleep randomly, sometimes.

I am driving into Jaipur, it seems I had a business trip in Delhi and having had some free hours to kill I decided to go to Jaipur. I am driving past St.Xavier School and as I approach Lajpat Marg corner I see there is a bustling market there. In the melee of vegetable and fruit vendors who are parked in front of some shops I spot Baliram, unkempt like he always is, picking the odd vegetable or fruit, chatting with the vendors, walking through, slipping some in his mouth. I motion the driver to stop at the corner and having spotted Baliram and wanting to ask his well-being, I follow him up to a Kirana store.

He seems to be in an argument with the Kirana store owner (at this point I am wondering when did Golcha House turn into a vegetable market and Kirana store). I walk up and ask Baliram how he is doing? he smiles at me and complains that the store owner is not listening to him.

I introduce myself to the owner and tell him that let Baliram pick what he wants and I will pay. In fact I offer to give some extra so that if he needs anything in the future, they should give it to him.

While I am chatting, I turn to spot Puneet behind me. We are happy to see each other and I am surprised to see him in Jaipur. We start chatting and the owner orders some tea. We stroll out onto the terrace. It overlooks a lake ( in the dream, where St.Kabir High School used to be was now a huge lake starting from the St.Xavier's school grounds). There were jagged black rocks and people were swimming in the big waves. Some kids were playing as well. As Puneet and I chatted, I see Baliram just walking around talking to people downstairs. I see a woman running in the rocks. She slips in a puddle and stubs her toe. Puneet and me grimace. We feel her pain.

This time when I turn I see a pregnant Renu, Richa and Appu walking towards us. I am completely overwhelmed at this point, how the heck is everybody in Jaipur at the same time and that too on the terrace next to a kirana store. But we are all happy to see each other. It truly is a very happy moment. The kirana store owner and his brother are happy to see Appu, they seem to know him. I think to myself that all these changes might have happened after I had left Jaipur. The kirana store owners are talking about starting their own detergent brand and are very excited about it. We all smile and share their enthusiasm. They start telling Appu about the old house and how it is now a tall building and painted yellow. Their families come out. They seem to know Richa and Renu.

The kirana store brothers invite us inside into their house. We all move in into a nicely done up, warmly light, living room. It has a hint of modernity and a lot of old furniture pieces. It seems the kirana store guys have been doing well for themselves.

We are all chatting and creating 'khap' and I see Ritu Mami and my mother walking in. Both are dressed like as if they are going for a wedding. Ritu Mami has a pale blue Saree on and some kind of small bead pearl tops set in gold. Mom is dressed in a maroon and dark blue Banarsi Saree with some gold jewelery on. Mom looks at least twenty years younger. I am completely overwhelmed and excited. All of us have smiles on our faces.

I had to wake myself up. It was getting to be a bit too real.

A few weeks after the Shakespeare dream, I had the Chaucer dream


I'm among several people standing in the aisle of an Amtrak train-car. It isn't clear why we are standing up; we don't seem to be waiting to use the bathroom, and there are plenty of empty seats. In fact, I do have a seat to return to, which I imagine is true also for the three or four other standees.

As I stand there on the train, my thoughts are about how I would love to immerse myself in the study of British Literature of the Middle Ages. I murmur the word "daughter" as I am pretty sure it would be pronounced in Middle English--with the "gh" forming a "ch" shound like Yiddish chutzpah or Scottish loch. A woman standing near me comprehends my quiet utterance perfectly--she says to me, "you like Chaucer, don't you?" I say, yes I do.

She is wearing a very cheery blouse, with a white background and large patches of bright color. We talk in the aisle for a while, then I follow her to her seat. I don't necessarily sit down next to her, probably I sit in the row of seats behind her. As we are getting seated, I notice that she is wearing a wedding ring, and I'm dissapointed, as I had so much wanted to ask this balanced, erudite, delightful woman on a date. (I noticed also that she wore another ring on the middle finger of her opposite hand).

As we speak further, I learn that she is an expert on male sexuality and the misadventures thereof. This becomes another reason I would like to have her as a friend--at some point she could provide much-needed guidance/information in regard to such matters.

note: some time after dreaming the dream I realized that "daughter" as I pronounced it on the train--dauCH-ter--suggests also "doctor". (& btw, when I consulted a Middle English glossary I noted that the M.E. word was not "daughter" but "doghter").

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

Dream at the Asylum

Dreams can enter through bolted doors. I've heard them roaming the corridor. Many are shared, like germs — even this one, which finds me holding up my poor dead father, who has returned, and is too weak to stand.

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

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

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

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

I look out the window of my midtown office building at the ornate skyscraper next door: the Metropolitan Trust building, with its rather strange-looking spire (like a folded umbrella on a café table),





seems to be leaning. Then I’m on the tower, walking around on the “roof” that surrounds the spire. There’s an acrobatic feat happening on another skyscraper across the way: a daredevil is attempting to “dance” on the façade. She’s dressed like a circus acrobat, in a short, spangly outfit, and behind her stand her attendants in tight formation, dressed the same. But something happens: she slips off façade, and it looks like she’s going to throw the stunt and allow herself to die, but then she spots on a piece of construction equipment (it used to be called a steam shovel) and deftly lands on it. The steam shovel deposits her safely back onto the street, and everyone is impressed with her quick, creative thinking and physical agility. Then the spire of the Metropolitan Trust building droops over and finally breaks off. I run to the phone to call “311” and at the same time Google the building online to get the address. I can’t type “Metropolitan Trust” — there’s something wrong with the keys, they won’t go down all the way. I hit them hard, and break them: they rest on a little stack of staples, and now these staples are broken off. But somehow the address of the building is made known to me: 300 West 30th Street. The 311 operator comes on, and I can hear other people describing this disaster, so I hang up on him (plus I’m more interested in learning about the building now, and all the different versions of the tower and spire over the years). When I look back outside, I realize the building is only one story above the street, under an El, and somehow the tower and spire haven’t fallen, in fact the building seems to be nothing but the tower and the spire, with space enough for only one floor — if even that — below.


I take a closer look at the building because of the mysterious and very ancient-looking carvings on it. There’s an “OXO,” and Latin words, and gnomish caryatids:
























The whole thing is reminiscent of Roslin Chapel in Scotland, with its Masonic and Grail connections encoded in stone:


















There’s even a carving of a ship that recalls the coat of arms of Lutetia, the ancient name for Paris, and seems to be dedicated to the architect’s life-long love, a woman named Levitra:

As with Roslin Chapel, all the carvings have meanings of their own, and cumulative ones as well. I wish I could “read” them.

Then I’m with my friend Barbara DeVries, barefoot on a wet avenue near the building. I’m enjoying the feeling of the wet cement, but I’m also afraid of getting glass in my feet. Against a building, balanced on a broken sidewalk, are two small white buckets with an amazing array of treasures in them. I first notice pieces of polished turquoise, and then some raw unpolished bits like the kind I once found on the Mediterranean beach near Mojacar, Spain. Other gems and beautiful bits of stone are there, as well as mod Sixties-looking plastic bracelets and other jewelry. In the other bucket are scarves, blouses, etc. Barbara and I are going nuts over this stuff, taking pieces out, setting them aside. We can’t believe someone would leave these things out, and also that no one has been going through them. Then the guys to whom all the stuff belongs show up and begin setting up a stand. The prices are good, everything is “10% off,” and so I decide on some gems and a knock-off Fortuny scarf. Maybe it’s real.

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



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

Marilyn was shooting a movie in Kent. she had a small role. she kept to herself but it was obvious I knew her. & strangely I seemd to be living with my friend Cynthia. she & I saw Marilyn walking down the street & when we stoppd to chat I invitd Marilyn to lunch. this causd Cynthia to raise her eyebrows.



flash forward to our house & a ring of the doorbell. I opend the door & there was Marilyn – on time & wearing the dress she wore to her wedding to Arthur Miller. then I woke up.



when I got online this ayem I saw that Marilyn was in the news. home movies of her during the filming of “The Misfits” were auctiond.

Dreamed that Tony R. had a girlfriend. She had shortish brown hair, carried his photograph around with her, and was very phony but cheerful. His hair had gone completely gray.

Then I was competing on the t.v. show Top Chef. I was confused and couldn't grasp time and didn't know what the heck I was doing.

I’m back in Chicago after a long time away, and so is supermodel Elaine Irwin. We were childhood pals, and so we’re really happy to see each other. She and I are both wearing t-shirts and shorts, no make-up, and because we grew up together and she’s so happy to see me I don’t feel like a total schlub around her. We’re sitting on an old nubby couch talking, and I want to ask her how her husband, John Cougar Mellencamp, is , but I don’t want her to think I’m groupie-ing her so I could groupie him. She might be sensitive or something. Then he comes in. I always knew he was short, and way shorter than her, but I never realized just how short: he’s barely taller than the couch. And plus he looks like he’s had some bad plastic surgery, like Liberace, who was also short. I don't know what to say to him, and I don't want to seem like I'm sucking up because he's famous (and plus I don't want to alienate Elaine), and so I say, "Did German shepherds really herd sheep in Germany?"

Bone chilling cold and the strangest of dreams. I go outside to say goodbye to my daughter who is leaving with a group of friends.

‘Can I please have some money?’ she asks. She has very little these days. She’s not working much and is trying to save the little she earns for a trip overseas later this year. In the meantime, she must live. The front veranda is covered with stuff, cupboards and boxes. Soft toys hang from a series of strings pulled tight across the ceiling of the veranda. Who’s done this? I wonder. I turn to leave my daughter and notice that the verge of the footpath has finally been fixed after years but beyond the footpath and into our driveway the bricks are all higgledy-piggledy, as if someone has uprooted them to work on the drains. There is water too covering the front yard all the way down to the drain and I realise that my stockinged feel will get wet. I tip toe across raised objects to get back to the veranda calling to my husband as I go. I can see through the wide-open front door that the water is spilling down the front hallway onto the veranda from inside the house. The water is steaming.

‘Hot water,’ I yell. ‘We’ve sprung a leak.’

My husband tears apart bricks to get to the source of the problem. He’s furious with me it seems.

‘That bloke you organised. He’s stuffed it. I’m left with the problem.’

My husbnd is terse clipped and cruel. I burst into tears and run inside. There’s mess everywhere and I realise that in his rage with whatever mess or problems that were there in the first place, my husband has compounded them by dragging almost everything out of its usual place and I will have to spend the rest of the day setting it right. Worst of all I have not been planning for this. What will people think if they arrive for a session to a veranda covered in junk?

The Sky is a Painting in Black and Red (12 Dreams)

(This dream series by Nick Piombino originally appeared in Ocho 20, published by Didi Menendez & issue edited by Kemel Zaldivar.

"I found the girl of my dreams and now all I do is sleep"
—David Abel

1. I'm at an event and it's over. I go to the front to get some flyers for upcoming programs. Jay [Sanders] is there and I take a couple. I see an announcement for an event after New Year's. (I've been dumping coffee beans into a coffee can in some part of the dream). Charles [Bernstein] shakes my hand and I say, "Are you going somewhere?" thinking we would be riding uptown together. Somebody laughs (sarcastically, I think) but Jay [Sanders] or Drew [Gardner] say to me, "I like the things you said." I am feeling embarrassed like I had said something too serious. The bag on the floor isn't mine. It's wrinkled and flat.

2. I'm shopping in a bookstore. The owner tells me that my collecting is "too indirect." I should "carve out a path." After a long wait I leave with the two catalogues. He runs after me and asks for his twenty dollars. I tell him—laughing—that if he had these every time I visit he could make $20 a week. I'm walking down the street and I realize the two magazines are gone. A guy sitting there says he saw some guys in a car come along and take them.

3. I'm giving a reading using first lines of Ashbery. Somebody throws a U shaped pot at me. I'm looking to throw something back. I don't see anybody trying to help me.

4. I am at a dinner I haven't been invited to. I feel awkward and embarrassed. I walk through a long hall. There are many guests and I don't recognize anybody. I'm looking for the television room or somewhere to be alone. As I am trying to leave someone asks me what I am doing there. Then I leave with a group of surly looking people who don't look like they are having a good time. I go out and start wandering around.

5. I'm in a fancy place with lots of rooms. There is an event going on. A man asks me if I still have my badge (I am a detective). I tell him I've been in the bureaucracy so long I don't need a badge because I know who I am and there's an air of authority about me. I go into another room. Gary [Sullivan] is there. A lot of nice women's clothes. I'm thinking— where's Toni [Simon]—she should try on some of these clothes.

6. I'm giving a reading but all my papers are disorganized. I keep running around trying to find the poems I am going to read. I go up to the front but I can't do it. Someone turns the lights on and off.

7. All my stuff is on a blanket on the ground. Two people are standing nearby—a man and a woman. She laughs at me. I say, I hope you enjoy this because it's the only fun you're going to have today. She is speaking in French on the phone.

8. I'm elsewhere on the way to see Gary [Sullivan] and Nada [Gordon]. I am having trouble leaving. I am outside and the sky is a beautiful oil painting—I can't stop looking at it—in black and red shapes.

9. Toni [Simon] and I are at an event and James [Sherry] is saying that when Jackson [Mac Low] and Ann [Tardos] dance the reason that they shake their butts so much is that they have long legs. I disagree with this—and an argument ensues. At some point Toni tells me I should apologize. Somehow I'm at the door and I'm coming in again. I have a lot of stuff on the floor to put back in boxes. There's a music box and a couple of clocks. I'm on the floor looking at the number on the cover. I don't see a 13.

10. I'm supposed to be at work but I go to a special celebration for Charles [Bernstein] instead. There are people on the stairway lining up to go. They are holding wooden briefcases that have been given out. I go outside and see Charles who walks over to a stand to get me one. At first I don't like it because some of the wood pieces are sticking up. Then I look at it again and I see that the pieces are situated on the back part and look roughly like two arms of an armchair so I decide to take it. I go upstairs to have my lunch but when I leave I forget to bring my wooden briefcase. I run back upstairs but now the waitress is gone and the place is closed. It's too late to go back to work. It's 9:15 pm. Earlier I had seen a highly polished dark wooden briefcase at the stand. But that was not one celebrating Charles.

11. Toni and I are hanging out with an Indian man. They are flirting. He says to Toni—"You don't make me feel like I will be a great writer." Then I say to him, with a laugh: "She makes me know I will be a very great writer."

12. Toni and I are going to the university cafeteria. We have to walk through some buildings in the basement to get there. When we do get there you have to go through the kitchen, but the kitchen is covered with several inches of water. Obviously we can't walk through this. We ask them how to do it, but they are ignoring us. I say, "I am going to call the university president." They say: "So call him." We are walking away and go into another entrance. I see an artwork of zigzagging lights—a picture of two workers—blue and white lights. I tell Toni I am calling the manager.

3 The night after I wrote the post about the imaginary library, I dreamed that I was rereading Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, in the pages of which I encountered a book I'd failed to note in my post: Ghost Whim, by Robin Anne Powter.

According to Nabokov's narrator in my dream version of Laughter in the Dark, Ghost Whim is a cultural history of dreaming . . . but before I could learn what would happen if I read a nonexistent cultural history of dreaming inside an actual novel inside a dream, I woke up. But now I really want to read that book!

4 This final item has nothing to do with an imagined book, but I can't resist adding it--my excuse is that it ties in to the discussion of Nabokov because it might have been triggered by a conversation Ed Park and I had last night about the ape that is discussed at the end of Lolita. It's another dream, this one from a brief doze on the bus on the way home today:

I was at the zoo, watching a gorilla very close-up through the bars of his cage. He gave me a quizzical look, tugged at his earlobe, then pointed at my earlobes while mouthing the word, "Earring?" I stared for a second, then remembered that I was wearing a big, gold pirate-style hoop in each ear.

Going all the way back to vaudeville days . . . that had to be the gorilla my dreams, right?

And that's all for tonight, because I have no choice but to go spend the rest of the evening reading Roberto Bolano. I'm 200 pages into The Savage Detectives and it's proving ridiculously difficult to put down.

Fifteen days on the road and dreams filling in with U.S. Army trucks-- deuce and a half, ten ton fatigued monsters being prepped and sold to corporations to do some kind of mysterious labor in Guatemala. Color coded spec sheets shuffling around and I start to imagine trucks as people, agents, with a human sort of fate, condition. Mercenary or trafficked, I don't know. Hollowed out, silent, too expensive to own, and what for? So gratuitous for camping or any honest work, and that coming to light with red poppies and purple bluebells whirring by us on the highways, and a smell like basil and coca-cola everywhere. At home again, and sleeping alone always like a child, the sleeping alone feels like the disoriented dream, and remembering real instead the twelve states' bodies and trap of cold, wet open air, fire-surviving, brass band Broadway musical, Auburns, Cords, and Duesenbergs flashing down terrazzoed country routes, meat as a matter of fact, in some homemade version of love, and being given the unexpected gift of a pale pink bicycle forged specifically to suit only me and my purpose...

Two Dreams Following the Death of a Girlfriend



5/9/08

When I walked out of my apartment building and across the two driveways that front it on West End Avenue I noticed a parked black car. I thought it was a limousine but when I passed the side of it two doors opened from the center like a carriage. Inside were four fashionably dressed women, long legged and heavily made up, so much so that I found it frightening. Their faces were white, pasty and blank except for eyes heavily lined in black. “We give women a ride”, one of the passengers said. She opened the square door wider inviting me to enter. Fearful I walked away quickly toward Broadway. I was aware the car was following me. I dialed my husband on my cell but each number punched in wrong, my fingers could not control the digits. On 65th St musicians carrying instrument cases were boarding a bus. I thought to fold into the orchestra’s line and ride away from the danger. The bus started down 9th Ave toward the Lincoln Tunnel and in the 50’s I requested to get off. I descended the steps of the bus in Hell’s Kitchen but suddenly it became a desolate stretch of green mowed fields and carefully sculpted shrubs. The black car, one door ajar, was waiting in the distance.





5/23/08

The architecture was such that there were no silences but arpeggios ascending and descending and long trills in a high register, neo Baroque style, much like Busoni.

The improvisation I heard in my head instantly transcribed to the page. It was as if it was never to be played but its form on paper would become something tangible, something woven, a covering, a shroud of protection. We were lying on the bed, giggling the way fifteen year old girlfriends do. The room was mine of the past. Windows opened to the seashore, lavender flowers papered the walls. But this shroud hung over us and although I could see myself lying there with Bonnie, I couldn’t hear what we were saying. I thought to move and let this covering follow over us so drew up my legs and started quickly toward the door. Turning back I saw Bonnie still lying there, motioning with her hand for me to go.

Dreams-in-progress

I walked into a party. Men I'd heard of were there, and more than "heard of," whose intimate veiled thoughts revealed in pages of risky avant garde literature I had read. I was wearing new shoes that were a half size too small. My feet had grown from pounding the pavement looking like someone. The homelessness had broken open in me without interrupting shelteredness.

I had slept with a dry head in a soft bed, alone. It was as if I had always slept that way. I might have resorted to holding a stuffed animal. There was a reason for this celibacy, but it was not religion or disease. It was society. I had exceeded a limit placed on all of us -- how many hands we are to hold before picking the hand we most wish to hold for life. I had thought it was a numeral, but it was a resonance, one that happens early then recurs.

I hit upon it with a musician, a famous man married for decades, a soul already spoken for, enough. I was poor (despite my shelter), and I had learned that "poor" is different from "broke," which didn't apply to all poor people. "Broke” described the noveau poor. And "clarity" I suggested we use when "enough" had been reached.

I dreamt in three dreams that we were at a poetry reading and at two AA meetings. In the second dream of the meetings, the married musician suggested that I read seafaring novels to help the alcoholic I had next met. The alcoholic had rejected AA as brainwashing. Enough, enough, enough, but it wasn't yet enough: clarity in action.

In the earlier dream about the meetings –- the rooms change –- I am bottomless under the table and must cross the room to find pants. My fat shows, fat that wasn’t there when he met me, vantage he would not have seen.

In the dream of the poet, there is a wide sweeping lawn, and we flirt, but it is or is not the same thing, and we have no words for it: “legislation,” “negotiation,” “foundation.” I collide with him on a hill and knock him over. I recircle the hill to see him, but by then he is busy.

Earlier, not ten years of it, I had walked into Keillor's bookstore, and the word "clarity" was written across a banner under the ceiling. Enough, I was thinking, but the furtive position of one seeking clarity or enough, quietly or alone, was barely enough when I couldn't see those brown eyes or pass a guess.

Dreamovie 61

I am wandering, hypnopompic, through a dream, but it is a dream almost entirely without plot or action. I am watching a section of dry earth, and I do not know if it is horizontal (the ground) or vertical (the face of a cliff). The earth before me is flowing downward past my eyes or I am moving forward over it. I cannot tell which. The earth is a light brown and jagged. At times, in places, red ants crawl out of the earth and crawl over it like the shadow of a cloud. The movement of the earth speeds up, and my view becomes blurry. The morning sunlight shines through my eyelids, and the view disappears.

Hamlet dream, a few months ago
I happen to encounter some people who are cast members anticipating the first performance, in a day or two, of a production of Hamlet, and I remember, before they speak to me, that I had committed myself to playing the title character! I haven't attended any of the rehearsals, nor memorized or even studied the part, yet they need me to fulfill my committment.

Then it is evening, and I am purposefully walking around the basement level of a B&N bookstore. I find some inexpensive versions of individual Shakespeare plays, including Hamlet, amongst a collection of paperback books locked inside a glass case. I would have to call a clerk over to unlock the case so I could have the book, and either I don't want to do this because I feel too shy about it, or I have some other reason for deciding against purchasing the paperback. I go the bookshelves at the far end of the store, and I quickly find a complete edition of Shakespeare's works, totally free for the handling, though of course it is a much more expensive volume than those Shakespeare books that were within the glass case. I'm very seriously thinking of buying this book, but then I start pondering whether this is the best edition of the Complete Works. I try to remember what I know about the various editions.

Apparently I do not purchase the play in any form whatever.

The next day I arrive at the playhouse to take part in the performance. The audience has not arrived yet, but the actors are getting into position to start the play. Or perhaps this is because it is a last rehearsal. I walk on stage and ask the people near me where I am supposed to stand. I am led to the back of the stage, and then far to the left, near the shore of a lake. It seems like I am actually outdoors rather than amongst painted scenery, or at least that the distance I have traversed is much too large to be congruent with an indoor stage (and surely I have walked so far left that the audience will not be able to see me).

Dreamovie 60

I am sitting in a restaurant with a group of people. A man is telling us about the restaurant and how it works. He explains that the meal begins with a large meatless buffet, one that can fill us up quickly. He notes that, after we fill our plates at the buffet, waiters will come around with various meats on skewers and cut off pieces for us. He tells us that the meat includes beef, pork, chicken, sausages, and (this one a surprise) meat pies, each brought out on a skewer. With this introduction, we begin to gather food at the buffet, but we soon find ourselves stuffed and decide to pause our meal and return later that evening for the meat course.

I return to the hotel where a conference of town clerks is taking place. I walk up a narrow set of stairs and find myself in a small office right off the stairs but within the staircase, not in the hallway outside the staircase. Inside that cramped office, a man works at a small desk. A woman attending the conference enters and asks for help. Afterwards, she needs to return to the conference, so I offer to assist her. We take an elevator down and then escalators down deeper. We pass through milling crowds on two or three floors.

When we arrive at our destination, I discover that we are in a large dark room, with a huge set of stairs, reminiscent of a ziggurat, that covers an entire wall and slopes down into the depths fo the room. The audience for this event is either against the wall on the edges of the stairway or around a small flat stage at the bottom of the stairs.

I am supposed to speak, so I stand on the pad at the top of the stairs and take the microphone. I ask the entire audience if they know when my group is returning to the restaurant for the meat course. The crowd is large and tumultuous, and no-one attempts to answer, at least so far as I can tell.

At this point, a country music star and his band begin to set up his equipment on the lower stage. He is preparing to sing, so I walk down towards him to see how the setup and performance are proceeding. By the time I make it down to the stage, the band is breaking down its equipment, and I'm not even sure if they have sung even one song. Bob Newhart then appears on stage, carrying his usually half-bemused half-confused look. Wearing a suit, he prepares to launch into a monologue, but before he does I notice that large aquaria lined up along the edge of the stage.

A man comes onto the stage, carrrying a large hollow tube. The tube connects to a bit of flexible tubing and a large pump, and he explains that this can be used to move the large fish in and out of the aquaria. He offers me the tube so I can move fish into the tanks. Instead of fish, I move watermelons of various sizes into the cold water, dropping them between the swimming fish.

Runnicles:

1. A snake swimming through water.

2. A glowing Gideon with a blanket wrapped around his head (like the Virgin Mary).


* * *

Last night I dreamed that I was at a fancy mansion buffet. The people there pushed around their food, drinks and books on wheeled carts. I thought, "ah, this is how the rich do it" but didn't use a cart myself. I started at the buffet and one of the staff brought out a bowl of white corn that the chef made especially for me because he/she knew I liked it. I filled two small bowls and ate a spoonful. Then I considered getting a cart.

RUNNICLE.

A runnicle is an image left over from dream left in the mind at waking, an image or fact with no narrative content or context.
This information is itself a runnicle, I wake with it, and hurry to write it down to share this runnicle with the dream community.

With machetes, we surprise attack another alien species in a sterile
white room that oscillates into being a news report of a battlefield,
and the white room.

As we are shooting, I am wondering why we are.

Suddenly I re-enter the white room. The alien species and the ones
with me who attacked them are all sitting there, casually, hanging
out, watching a movie on a big screen, no traces of warfare or the
slightest hint of enmity.

Dr. Temperance Brennan (aka Bones) is pregnant. As the pregnancy progresses, it becomes obvious to everyone that it's not a human fetus. She is being guarded by a centipede/alien-like creature that prevents anyone from "saving" her although it's likely too late even if someone could. Her body is contorting and the birth will no doubt be deadly and it's likely her body will be the offspring's first meal. Angela arrives and gives her a cigarette. Bones puts the lit cigarette backwards (lit end) into her mouth. It's the best way to die at this point.

I nodded off on the L on my way home from work yesterday while reading Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta (1866), and my half-dreams were of the novel--but as if it had been written by Alvaro Mutis, whose Maqroll stories I had spent the weekend reading. Waking, I was amused at the ease with which the world-weariness of Mutis had infiltrated Hardy's uncharacteristically comic novel.

If you'd asked me, I would have said the two writers had nothing in common, but the dream reminded me that Hardy's more typically tragic novels do share with Maqroll a certain fatalistic vision. I was reminded of an exchange I've quoted before from a conversation that Hardy had with Princeton professor Henry Van Dyke in 1909, about Tess:

"Yes," he said gravely, "I love her best of all."

"Why, then, did you kill her? Was there no other way to end the book"

"There was no other way," he replied, still more gravely. "I did not kill her. It was fated."

Maqroll would understand, though whereas he tends to complacently accept, or even welcome, his fate, Tess is unforgettable because she rails against hers--and by vigorously opposing it, hastens its tragic arrival.

A few nights ago I had a dream that I dressed as a woman in order to marry Joe Massey, in order to be able to visit him in prison. I remember Joe saying something like, "No one's ever going to believe you're a woman," and he was right, and I had to spend a lot of time, an endless amount of time looking better. It was a disjointed jaunt this dream, but I do remember walking on the streets of Joe's California seaside town and no one paid us any mind, which was all we really needed, to pass.

Dreamovie 59

I am traveling with someone by car. We are approaching a bridge and cars are all around. I don't know this at the time, but we are driving either to Long Island or Iraq. The exact place is unclear, though everything appears to be in the United States.

We meet a woman who lives in one of a series of small blocky buildings. She explains that there was a big sale at the PX, as there is from time to time, and that she has purchased supplies at a great discount. The only downside to all of this, she explains, is that she may have to abandon her home soon. The area around her home seems peaceful, but we know a war is ongoing in the region.

After this traveling, I am in a city but I still have to get somewhere. I am on a busy street and find a car that might be mine. I back the car into traffic, make a dangerous U-turn and then drive on.

I find myself eventually in a low-slung building and then in a narrow hallway in that building. I enter a room through a doorway on the left, and I find myself in a cramped operating room, where the surgeon explains his style of surgery. He believes in strapping patients to an operating table and suspending them. I imagine being suspended overhead, the surgeon cutting into me, and my dripping blood onto the floor.

Although I am still clothed, I lie down on an operating table. A woman is strapped on another operating table, and she is raised over mine. She faces me as the two tables slowly come together. We are pressed together, our heads turned to face away from each other. Slowly our tables rotate to a vertical position and move away from each other. In that position, our feet over the ground, we await our surgery.

I found some sort of typo in Boswell's Life of Johnson that somehow turned an ordinary sentence into some sort of prognostication about my brother's life. Even as I dreamed it, I was amused by the thought--but impressed nonetheless--but on waking I lost almost all the details.

Dreamovie 58

I am unable to sleep well, and my dream intersects with my waking world. Some birdsong I do not recognize is sounding outside my window. The song is reverberating against this cold wet spring morning and repetitive. I try to recall the song. In my dream, I try to take notes on the song. I imagine I am writing these in bed. First, I have a notepad by my bedside and I write in that, but I realize that I do not have such a pad. So I am lying flat on my back, still asleep, but in my dream, still flat on my back, I am typing my notes into a computer. As I go through my dream, I find more experiences that require me to take notes. After taking dozens of notes, I realize I am dreaming that I do not have my laptop in the bed with me, that I haven't taken any notes at all, and that I'll need to remember these events on my own. I cannot wake myself up to take the notes, so I dream through them.

While trying to remember these notes, I am walking behind my family's house in Tennessee, but it it not in Tennessee nor is it that same house. The backyard is huge, fenced in, dotted with trees, and it slopes gently downward. I walk through that space trying to remember everything I see, trying to take notes in my head as I walk around bushes and avoid trees. Beyond the end of the yard is another large house. I walk up a sudden rise and into that house.

Many people live in that house, and a gathering of some kind is taking place. I am looking for something there, though I cannot recall what. I leave a group of people chatting in the kitchen to find what I am looking for. I find Ray in a bedroom preparing for a trip to Europe. His room is large and neat but filled with knickknacks. The walls of the room are burdened with posters and various plastic trinkets and figurines. As he finishes his packing, we talk. Some mild joke I release into the air gets Ray quite upset. I am surprised by this because I meant no harm at all.

Ray walks outside during our continuing conversation, dragging his rolling suitcase. I follow him and am surprised to find that, by leaving through the other side of the house, we are on a city street. The side I entered on was suburban at best and actually fairly rural. As we walk down the street, I calmly explain that I had no intentions of hurting Ray, and he finally relents and accepts my apology, expressing surprise that I have acted so calmly when he has reacted so emotionally to me.

I am in the basement of the house Ray shares. I am with two other people, colleagues of mine, and we apparently live in that room together. We are planning to go to a conference on the work of bpNichol, and the woman says she needs a bedroom of her own beforehand. I find this a reasonable request and discover that there is a little empty antechamber to Ray's bedroom. I suggest that this will make a good bedroom for her. All I have to do is approve this use of the room with the woman in charge of the house, but as I go to speak to the woman I realize that I am not trying to justify a separate bedroom at a conference but a separate bedroom in the house, and that is a much more difficult justification to make in this culture. I know I will be asked why this woman needs a room of her own.

Somewhere in this house there is a doctor, who sometimes performs surgery on the inhabitants of the house. She finishes with a woman I know, and then it is my turn for surgery. I do not trust her, and I've made that clear during her surgery on my friend. I am lying down, waiting for the surgery to begin. The surgeon carefully unwraps her instruments, which include (for some reason) a flat double-edged razor blade and various needles and pins, as well as scissors, scalpels, and the other expected tools of her trade. I decide I do not want her to conduct surgery on me and I am just about to sit up (I am not anesthetized) when the woman scoops up all of her tools and throws them down onto my face.

I immediately begin pulling the objects out of my cheeks, my forehead, my eyes, even my tongue. The woman becomes disturbed by what she has done and wants to help me, but I tell her to stay away from me. I am bent over, facing the ground, and dropping sharp little bits of metal to the floor. My friend, who has never left the room, is still with me, and she explains, she already knows, that I am blind in my right eye.

In my dream I was hypergraphia hypergraphia hypergraphia--wrote long pythons / nylons. I would write for 24 hours as an experiment that paraded as a joke.

All of the books on my bookshelf were empty. Blank pages fluttering like birds.

You walk into an elevator and exit
completely different.

You erase R erased.

Fairfield Inn, Room 220, Baton Rouge, Louisiana

I dreamed I had created the most resonant of praecisio poems, a poem that said everything that could be said about nothingness and was simultaneously unsettling and revitalizing, incandescent. Now that I am awake, I know nothing more of the outlines of the poem, so all I can do is accept what I believed in my restful sleep and remember that I am the creator of that poem and that, in some way, I am the creator of nothingness, the ultimate goal of any creator: to make something so overwhelming that it changes the core of reality. I am a creator, so I dream, sometimes in Schenectady, sometimes in Baton Rouge, sometimes in Englewood, sometimes in Chautauqua, moving, moving, ever searching for that one scrap of one of my creations to fit back into the hole my mind conjured in the hazy fabric of the universe.

There were dead children throughout my dream. A grand party at my brother’s house interstate or was it my friend Ann’s, because they were Ann’s children. She had sixteen of them and slowly one after the other they fell ill. But no one called the doctor. Instead the children lay down on the kitchen floor and people walked beside them, stepped over them as though they were bits of furniture and the children’s skin lost it’s pinkness and turned to a sickly grey colour and soon enough their chests stopped heaving with the effort to breathe and they were dead. We knew they were dead but no one grieved or shed a tear. No one commented on the sadness of it all, the party continued and other children played on around the two dead ones. People ate and drank. I was upset because I sensed there was no room for me. The place was so crowded with friends of my brother’s children. They came in droves. They took liberties in my brother’s house. They borrowed his expensive cars without asking him and there was nowhere that I could settle down. I wanted to watch a movie of some tourist island that I had down loaded into a special mechanism on my neck, a holiday island. Maybe that’s what I’m desperate for some holiday place away from all this rancour. I long for it.

I go into a steam room (the steam part is off) -- fully dressed, mind you. Three male poets of differing Asian descent are there. We take turns reading from Nick Carbo's book, Secret Asian Man. One of them starts feeling dizzy. I tell him he's getting hives on his face. We leave the room for air.

like last night i'm having an erotic dream about a girl i'm not particularly attracted to in real life when out of nowhere a monstrous scabby dreadlocked "lady" emerges from the bushes outside my parent's house and just stares at me. this is incredibly scary. she looks a little like the weird homeless lady-thing from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive.

i woke up, checked my room for anything weird, made sure humanoid shapes were just "shapes"...but still couldn't get back to sleep.

I'm delivering a package on behalf of Lynn Behrendt to either my Pilates studio or my old gym. I go to the Pilates studio first. I pass a soldier on the way who is looking for the package, it's his job to get it, but he doesn't bother with me or try to take it. I walk back home, realize I forgot to do something, and walk back, this time crawling past the soldier -- he pays me no mind. I go into my old gym and a woman who works there greets me, says certain trainers miss me or want to work with me. I don't remember most of them, but pretend I do. She enourages me to attend special sessions over the weekend, but I tell her I'm going to be out-of-town. She says X (another poet, will remain nameless else he may self-google and get an inflated ego) will be teaching a self-defense class on Sunday at 3:00. I ask if he's coming all the way down to VA just to do that. Then I remember that he's doing something at the Pilates studio at that time -- and tell her of the potential scheduling conflict.

I walk out -- going a different way that takes me right past the soldier who is sitting on the desk outside the parking lot. He has to be aware that I have information about the package, but again he pays me no mind and is speaking to someone on the phone about it. A man walks by me and I hear him saying that there was something very dangerous in that package. I don't know what was in it, but I doubt what he's saying. I try to imagine what might be in it, I think maybe wine, but realize the package wasn't heavy enough. I consider warning Lynn or the people I delivered it to, but don't.

I had a dream last night I had $500 and took out $50 to play blackjack and started thinking that I knew I was going to lose the $50 but that it was worth it because I felt excited and I started defending all gamblers in my head as better people than normal people, then I went to a table and asked if there were $10 blackjack tables and she said the place had no blackjack at all and it was stupid of the place not to, I don't remember what I did after that, I think two girls in my dream were "in love" with me so I had something to "fall back" on.

I stood at the podium under the stage lighting looking out into a dark expanse, probably filled with faces, but I couldn't make them out. The next time I looked up from my paper shuffling, the auditorium was a bar or cafe, with railroad-style rooms, two or three of them, maybe like the Ear Inn. I shuffled some more, made some humming, hawing remarks to smattered laughter. I found what I thought was Down Spooky, a dark-covered thin book, and opened it, flipping through to find a poem with which to begin. But it turned out to be an anthology I wasn't in. I stopped on a page containing a poem by _______ (an exciting find, if puzzling in the context, though now I can't remember whose it was). More shuffling. Finally I found For Girls and thought, well that's fine, I'll start with those. But I opened to the first poem and the letters swam around on the page. I attempted to recite from memory and made it through the first three poems pretending to read, concealing my trouble with the swimming pages, but by the fourth poem couldn't go on. I looked up to address a confession to the audience, which I spoke aloud. It woke us both, but I'd already forgotten it. I lay awake for 2 hours or so.

The Apocalypse has come and we’re living on the top floors of Macy’s in the home furnishings department.

We never go out – or even downstairs -- sleeping on demonstration mattresses under stiff jacquard spreads.

There are no windows, only window treatments.

Drapes hang from curtain rods suspended from the ceiling at the head of every bed.

I play my cello, but I’ve only just taken it up. I keep scratching away, hoping to hear that melodious cedar sound. I am sitting on the edge of the bed, my cello between my knees, when my bow breaks. Did I break it? Did someone walk by and catch it with their knee?

It’s not crowded in Macy’s like it is on Christmas Eve -- it’s more 10am on a Wednesday -- but all this the furniture, arranged in conversation tableaux, clutters and stultifies my soul, like I’ve been rescued by the Victorian Age.

I hold the broken bow and its baleen dangles, hideous as a broken bone.

Tony takes the bow from my hand and snaps the wood into even smaller bits against his thigh. He does this absent-mindedly, as if disassembling cereal boxes for recycling.

I am aghast. I can’t comprehend this injustice done me. Who told him he could touch my bow? Why did he think he could get away with this?

I begin to protest but see that, in his eyes, he’s done me no wrong.

I feel post-apocalyptic Macy’s weigh down on me and I begin to scream.

Even in my own ears, I sound shrill, hysterical.

This dream is the opposite of a catharsis; it feels like sludge, burdening me.

All of our excess books (we have a lot of books) magically appeared neatly shelved in a grove of trees about half a mile from our house. It made perfect sense for them to be there, and somehow we knew it was our personal library, and couldn't be used by anyone else. Rain didn't seem to be an issue.

I am walking/floating with a group across a hillside that slopes down to an ocean-a soft breeze blowing very green and layered with small white flowers. One person says excitedly, "Look those flowers are shaped like bells!" I realize we are in Ireland. I see in my mind in the dream a flag blowing with "California" written in cursive on it and I think-I love California after being to every other place in the world. We are now at the bottom of the cliff, at the shore of the ocean. I am with a woman who is a tour guide, we are being hurried to leave because we have to get to the airport, but we stand there and look up at what is called The Great Tree, a massive tree set into the cliff, a trunk with long pieces of bark that have fallen off leaving spaces it appears for you to walk inside. She is telling me about the tree, and I hold up a photograph I have with me against the sight of the tree, like you would hold your thumb up against the moon. The picture is of a dark greyish green sculpture of the back of a woman sitting at the top of long steps in a public place-the most prominent feature of the photograph is the buttocks of the sculpture poised in the position she is in sitting very straight. We walk back up the hillside/cliff and she, the tour guide, walks into a cave on the side of the cliff a group of people are huddled in laughing welcoming her in and I without a doubt part from her and continue walking upwards.

I straddled the toilet seat, lid down. I had wanted to find a place of escape, somewhere protected from the prying eyes of people who might notice my flushed cheeks, my shame. The frustration of standing in the queue at Medibank waiting my turn, sandwiched between three women, all of whom knew one another and were chatting amicably about the days events, their children’ antics, their husbands eccentricities, this closed shop of womankind, was too much for me. And worse, when I all but reached the end of the queue and my ticket number was about to be announced, I rifled through the internal compartments of my hand back, past reluctant zippers and abandoned lolly wrappers only to find that I had forgotten my Medibank card and receipts. I would not be served.

‘I’ve forgotten my forms’ I stammered to the woman behind me. ‘You can have my place.’ I fled from the building. Earlier I had made a fuss of not being allowed into my rightful place in the line because I had come into the building through an adjacent entrance and not through the one that most people, most women, they were all women, including those serving at the counter, had followed.

Out on the street I looked across the concrete wasteland to the service station opposite. I could smell the loose oil, petrol and seared rubber from skidded tyres. The garage toilet, garages always have toilets for their patrons, would be tucked somewhere behind the main building. These days you have to ask at the main desk for a key, but in my dream I did not need a key. The toilet was slightly ajar and it stank, as you might expect, of disinfectant, urine and shit. I sat down on the toilet seat. I could not close the door of the narrow cubicle. It shed light into the corridor, an airlock that shielded the nakedness of the toilet from the outside world, the back of the garage, the stacks of used rubber tyres and empty petrol tins. I looked down at a mango I had produced from my bag, and pulled apart it’s already cut flesh. Someone had slit the knife through the mango making a crisscross pattern for easier eating. I forced up the skin to raise the yellow mango and began to chew off lumps of sticky sweetness. The juice ran over my fingers, down my chin, onto my lap. I did not care. There was something in the fruity sweetness of the mango that offered me comfort and I ate like a starving person, till the outside door opened and through the slit of the door I could see one of the station attendants waiting his turn for the toilet. He would have barged right in had I not managed to push the toilet door close, dropping the mango onto the floor. This was enough to indicate the toilet was occupied, but not enough to send the man away. He continued to wait for his turn. I wiped my face with my hands. I peeled off sheets of toilet paper to try to soak up the sticky excess from the mango. I puzzled about how I might hide the mango halves now dust covered on the floor. I could not conceal them. I would leave them there I decided, hoping the man might think they were someone else’s and not mine. I reached back to flush the toilet. The water echoed under the closed lid like a waterfall.

‘It’s the smallest toilet I’ve ever seen,’ I called out to the man, in a tone I hoped might sound nonchalant and normal. Then I squeezed my way out of the door past the man and back into the sun-blinking daylight.

I have not been able to describe the desolation I was feeling throughout all these movements. I was in a dream. I knew I was in a dream. In a dream I could feel the full impact of my sadness, my worry over ‘running out of resources’. This was my fear; that I would have no more money to pay my bills.

The secretary from the garage came over and handed me a bill, $211.00. I was relieved. It was for services rendered. Earlier the apprentices, supervised by the head mechanic, had cleared water from the petrol tank of my daughter Tessa’s car. It had been a lucky escape. Any more water in the engine and the car would have been non-drivable, irreparable without a complete tank clearance.

We’re driving near the Hudson River, but it looks like a road in Maine, one that we go on every summer, between Kennebunk and York, I think. The road goes right down to the water. It’s winter. The car slides off the road in what feels like slow motion & falls in slow motion into the river. The car cracks through the ice. We’re all thrown in. I am plunged down, deep into the water. I look up, frantically trying to swim to get to my son, who I know has just fallen in the water after me. I have to save him—he can’t swim. I can’t seem to get back up to the light where he is--the pressure from the water holds me down. Unbearable sadness. I know we’re both going to die.

2nd dream, another nightmare. A bigger turtle, eating a little turtle. Again, I am trying to save someone. This time, it’s the little turtle. The poor little turtle tried to pull back into its shell but by the time I get there, both its legs have been bitten off by the big turtle. Gory. Awful. It's not dead, just in horrible pain. I wake up gasping.