DREAM DIARY

March 5, 2008
It was my first day working in a library and a tall man was showing me around the stacks.  He would show me where to get the returned books and then wipe his eyes with a balled up tissue.  Then he would show me how to hold the elevator door with the cart and wipe his eyes again.  It seems he could not stop crying.  Soon I was wheeling down the narrow maze of the old stacks replacing enormous bound facsimiles of Joyce's Buffalo notebooks when I heard some women snorting.  In the corner, at a carrel, three ladies were watching a show on a portable television.  The show was a series of makeovers for people who had been arrested and had to clean themselves up for court.  When the women saw me watching their TV, they grabbed me by the arms and held me to the ground.  One of them, a thick thing in curlers who had a match in her teeth, told me that the library was on fire.
 
 

February 27, 2008
What was I going to do?  I didn't know what to do.  Here I was in the fish's mouth.  No, I wasn't.  I was in bed thinking hard about where I was in relation to the hotel room I've been staying in.  My dream began with a troop of Cossacks demanding to see my privates.  Apparently some betting had been going on.  I ran into the forest, disrupting the late-night grouse hunt of the local drunk and lacerating my burnt face with brambles.  The brambles became Devil's Rope: two twisted strand wires with four point sheet metal arrow plate barbs split and shaped like a shark's fin.  It was then I felt myself flying upwards or swimming now through the thinning sycamores whose red leaves resembled hands on canes on canes (precarious!).  These leaves became floating chunks (of what ?) of fish and I found myself swallowed by a white whale, a warm avalanche!
 

February 23, 2008
An electrical smell at the ballet sent me behind the curtain in a panic I first noticed on the backs of my hands.  A girl with clear skin offered me a Xanax.  You could follow the blue vein down her breast.  She cut the pill in half with a knife, covering the operation with her left hand and asking me about some priceless red books which were needed and missing.  In these books were detailed the contents of a girl's stomach found in the woods whose hair had been licked off by an over-affectionate beast.  Taking the pill with a warm glass of wine, I went looking for the source of the electrical, burning odor.  I went down a long hallway but found that if I rushed, the hallway merely narrowed to a point but if I proceeded slowly, it went on forever. 
 

February 12, 2008
A man with a mustache painted on his lip came out of a box that fell off a truck.  I told my friend to hide but the man heard me.  He shot me and the hole in my stomach looked like wet newspaper.  I peeled away layer after layer and soon had my whole hand in the hole but there was no end to the soggy mess.  Then my friend said, "What's wrong with the sun?" and sure enough, the sun was blinking.  I thought I was losing my mind so I covered my eyes and screamed--Then I thought I had woken up but my room was surrounded by ladders.  I was in Manila, vacating the presidential palace.
 

February 8, 2008
I had no legs and was wheeling myself down the street behind a decent-looking woman.  She had a rather flattering skirt on and I was staring with greater and greater attention at her hindquarters trying to get the "old feeling."  My concentration soon had me at the cusp of fainting with the air coagulating in great arches around the lady's active posterior.  A couple of kids wearing their clothes backward came charging by with a red-white-and-blue basketball, scattering my attention like pigeons.  I pulled a whistle out of one of the pockets in my Army vest and blew.  It tasted of blood, like an old fork.  A dancer came out of a nearby strip joint and, surrounded as she was by pulsating red bulbs, I almost fell out of my chair.  With my free hand I tucked my cut-offs under my torso, also noticing in that instant my "old friend" at attention, so to speak.  The dancer was staring at me like a snake.  Her hair was blond and came over her shoulders in two long braids.   I set to stuffing my beard into my mouth and moaning.  My heart stopped, started again with a dribble, and began to pound.  What I had only barely noticed before as a soft siren had meanwhile grown into a crunching roar, like wind in a microphone, and I was utterly overcome.
 
 

January 29, 2008
Today's diary entry is illustrated for those uncultured.  Just as I was about to eat a  cannoli , a grey-haired woman snatched the  doily  it came on and ran off with it.  Bemused, I bit into my tasty dessert only to find it to be a shell for a tightly rolled scroll.  Not wanting to be a part of anything so shady, I disposed of the whole thing and went to a nice park where someone offered me a free tai-chi lesson.  When I agreed, the little man snuck me a scroll and told me to be careful.  Needless to say, I dropped the scroll and walked off to play Frisbee with a naked girl and her pit-bull.  One thing led to another and soon I was finding another scroll--decency prohibits my detailing where.  I tossed it, the scroll that is, but her dog kept fetching it and bringing it back to me which was about the most annoying thing that I have ever dreamed.  It was then the aforementioned old lady who had stolen my imitation-lace plate adornment brought a police officer and denounced me.  Despite the obvious senility of my accuser I was dragged to a police car.  The officer drove me a few blocks, letting me out of the car and handing me a scroll with a wink.  At this point I woke up, utterly sick of myself.
 

January 26, 2008
I found a lip on the floor next to my desk.  When I touched it my finger turned red.  Then I touched it with another finger and it turned red too.  Now I had two red fingers.  I spent the rest of the dream reading a book about the tidy liberation of some simple village girls by a fellow with salami on his breath.  I recall in one part of the narrative this fellow tried to grow a little beard under his mouth by sleeping with his face in a whore's lap.  While I sat reading, it rained short strands of ash that left specks on my window.  Apparently the everglades were on fire.
 
 

January 24, 2008
I was employed at a firm which researched the transitive property as it relates to communicative halos.  Handling stacks and stacks of halos, looking like coffee filters, I fell into conversation with a bearded man my coworkers referred to as Ripley because of his lonesome habit of reading various editions of the Guinness Book of World Records.  Ripley informed me that the smallest jerkin ever worn by a law professor was only one molecular layer thick and came from carving out a sausage skin with an ancient Japanese sword.  Suddenly, as is the character of dream, I was crying at the feet of a samurai about my guilt.  It seems I did not remove one of my own teeth to swallow as a symbol of this or that but instead swallowed a tic-tac.
 
 

January 22, 2008
I was brushing the ants out of some tabernacle when it dawned on me I was a priest.  Turning around I saw an empty church and a smoking bell floating down the pews.  I watched it zig-zag  its way back to the stained-glass window which pictured, I believe, several soldiers trying to march while holding enormous spoons.  On the altar in front of me was a challis of wine I reached for only to have it become a pen.  I sat down on the carpet and began to write a story on my handkerchief but the tip of the pen kept puncturing the cloth and I couldn't decide if I should write about two people in bed listening to someone pee or about a bus ride during which everyone asks to borrow everyone else's clothes.  To my horror, the doors of the church opened and well dressed people started to file in so I hid under the altar knowing my humiliation was imminent.
 
 

January 18, 2008
A short, feverish dream:  I was walking back to the dream lab from some Irish bar when some semi-bum tall dude with a really really busted nose said "hey" to me and so I said "hey" and then passed him.  From behind me he repeats, "hey man" and I turned around and he was walking right up to me going "I KNOW you" and he goes, "What's your name, David?" and I go "Jif" and he goes, "Jeff?" and he shakes my hand in a REALLY weird  way and so I start walking off and he goes "Don't forget me!"  I didn't touch anything until I got back to the lab and washed my hand with lots of soap.  He looked like Eric Roberts.  That's two gay dreams in one week!
 

January 16, 2008
I apologize for not updating this diary for so long.  Among the dreams I have had was one on the night of the 11th.  I was 13 again,  and over a friend from school's house for the first time, where several of my classmates had assembled for a session of Dungeons and Dragons.  It seems my friend, Sam, had a mentally retarded younger brother who ran a bit wild and had only three fingers on each hand.  Sam's single-mother made us English muffin-pizzas and the game slowly began.  Before much had happened, Brian took me aside and showed me his Apple II upon which ran an adventure game called "Sherwood Forest." Sam was a year older than myself and wore a back brace for his scoliosis.  He typed the word "blow" and the game responded its generic, "I don't know how to blow" which inspired giggling.  Now Sam began to tug at my belt and an instinctual push sent him falling, impaling him upon his back-brace.  The smell of blood sent me running back to the table where my other friends were all waiting, their heads turned to look out a sliding-glass window which looked upon a screened-in pool.  In the pool, I saw Sam's mother waist-deep, holding Sam's retarded brother under the water.  I felt as though this were my fault for deceiving my classmates as to the extent of my experience with Dungeons and Dragons.  I woke from this dream in a sweat, my sore throat the first indication of the flu I have suffered from for five days since.
 
 

January 8, 2008
Went to a county fair this weekend and decided to describe a dream to a Fortune Teller/Dream "Analyst" woman.  This old hag was a real moron--she didn't even know about the Internet--exactly what "future" was she going to look into??  Anyway, this is the dream I told her:  I limped through an alley between two parking lots and came upon a small park which consisted of a single hill littered with brown-paper-bagged bottles reminiscent of girdled jaspers or Mandarin ducks.  At the top of the hill was a sculpture of a faucet.  Here I stepped in something soft.  It was too cold to stop so I kept limping along, now noticing that whichever way I turned I was followed by a little piece of fluff.  It followed me out on a wooden platform which went way out over a lake and then stopped.  I saw cattails and clouds of gnats rising like fists and a cold alligator.  I shone a flashlight into the alligator's eyes and they blinked red so I knew it was a female.  Remembering the bit of fluff, I turned around and saw instead a bright light with little strands coming out like whiskers from the edges.  Turning back I noticed that I had to turn my whole body--no longer just my neck.  I was floating on my stomach in the icy water.  The old Fortune Teller at the fair said my dream meant that I was unhappy with my coldness towards others and feared the very isolation my intolerance ensured.  What a charlatan!
 
 

January 1, 2008
This sounds rather poetic, I'm afraid.  What can I do?  Sometimes dreams are arty.  It so happens that suns keep rising, one more beautiful than the next.  One's dark blue with lots of gold lights, one's red and dragging a fat pink ribbon. One's covered in mirrors.  People wake up sneezing, next to their skins.  They can barely hold their aching heads.  You have to sort of ball up.  At first it's hard to move.  You have to lick the end of each breath and stick it to the next.  Soon everything passes for normal.  A nice rain falls.  The drops hang in the air so we can look in them.  Little snakes roll around in each.  Then the moon moves and the stars scurry across the sky from behind it.  I'm crunching along down some street somewhere, watching the bats swoop down from the bell tower to mix with the pigeons flapping about like who-knows-what in the square where people sell the silverware of neighbors who disappeared or rub a certain spot on the nearby bridge for luck, perhaps on the belly of a figure in a relief commemorating an historical defenestration.  It's cold and my shoes are enormous.  I write a few lines in my diary:  "The tree wears a hat.  The church wears a hat."  Wings stick up from the road, blown flat then popping up again.   A little anxiety sticks me:  that my heart has stopped moving, I think that was the problem.  I wake up at midnight to the screams of my neighbors, who have just completed their yearly countdown.  A woman staggering by my window sees me sit up in bed and presses her face to the glass.
 
 

December 21, 2007
I had just turned in when I heard my window open.  I pretended to be asleep but when I heard someone crawling in I leapt up and flicked on the light.  An old man in his bedclothes was kneeling on my desk, pulling a sack through the window  behind him.   He was too hollow-chested and hairless to be Santa but just shaky and wild-eyed enough to be a lunatic.  I tried to be polite and said,  "Why have you come in my window, sir, and who are you?"  But he just waved me over and started digging in his shopping bag.  He said, "I dreamt of a very young woman who looked like she  wanted to eat me up!"  The old man smelled of mentholyptus and onions and, knocking my papers off the desk, pulled a pigeon from his sack:  "And look at this."  He parted the feathers on the pigeon's breast and on the skin I could see what looked like Hebrew letters.   "What's that?" I said.  "You've got eyes haven't you?" he snapped.  At this point the pigeon flew around my room throwing the old man into such a panic I woke feeling very depressed.
 
 

December 20, 2007
The world of dreams is often silly.  I've no illusions that this knocks the legs out from under my narrative.  Nonetheless, a prison got up on its hen legs and walked off, leaving all the inmates blinking in the sunshine and running off in all directions.  One officer being a stickler, shot a slow, rather fat escapee as he was climbing over some torn up plumbing.  One of the guards said we should eat the dead man but when he saw the surprise of the group, he claimed it "Just slipped out."  Just as ridiculous, a conversation between a baby and an egg:  the baby says, "You couldn't be more dull."  The egg replies, "That's what you say.  But not a hen."  The baby says, "What do you mean, 'not again'?"  The egg, "A HEN.  It's hard to speak through this shell."  The baby, getting up, "Hens are dull."  The egg, "What's the use of talking?  I wish I could give you a good smack!"  Then the baby sits down on the egg which breaks and runs off in all directions.  What a load of nonsense!  It occurs to me that the future will need such nonsense because of the logical rigidity of its computational ubiquity.  QED
 

December 19, 2007
A nurse was walking up the sidewalk when a Chinese man, short and old but not unkempt, caught her attention.  As she neared him she noticed he was holding a quarter in one hand and reaching toward her the other, wiggling his fingers.  She kept walking but as she passed looked into his face, realizing he had no upper lip, only a large sore that reached from his gums.  The nurse just then passed a walled-off playground where disembodied shrieking sent the blood rushing to her head and made her neck and shoulders itch under her uniform.  At this moment I was the nurse although the next moment I was again more like a roving camera observing the action, watching her drop in a shop for a slice of pizza.  Next to her sat two remarkably good-looking men.  One said to the other, "Stop complaining and hold your nose."  And the other replied, "It stings my eyes."   As the nurse ate she thought about taking a different route back but forgot to when the time came.  Instead of the Chinese man, she came across a series of  brass hooks which hung from thin chains reaching up into the clouds.
 
 

December 18, 2007
I was an ice sculptor who heard angelic music while I carved the big blocks into transparent fish.  I focused on the sound and was trying to decide if it was voice or instrument when the song very clearly told me I was dreaming.   Furthering my worry that the extensive study of dreams (as I have undertaken in immersing myself in the electric dream service) is beginning to effect my own dream-life, this weekend I had a lucent dream in which I came across an old girlfriend. Knowing that I was dreaming and being the future guardian of the world's dreams, I felt it incumbent upon me to conduct an experiment.  I told this "girl" that she was not a person but a dream, my dream, and, above her protests, explained to her that anything she had to say was coming from me-- a very frustrating realization for her I can tell you!  Well, she begged me to relay a message (I didn't want to remind her that the message was actually coming from my own unconscious, the poor dear was crying so), a message I was to deliver, upon waking, to the old girlfriend she "appeared as" or represented.  Her message: "Tell her that they will tell us exactly what to do."   As the message really had nothing to to with my old girlfriend I did not relay this message, in effect, breaking a promise to myself only.  My  regret is that I didn't inquire about to whom "They" referred, an oversight I can attribute to the fact that being aware one is dreaming is still a far cry from being awake.  My understanding was that "us" in the message referred to herself and what she now understood was her "real" self, i.e. my unconsciously animated representation of an ex-girlfriend and the actual woman living in Detroit that I haven't spoken with in several months.   As I write "several months" and think about this person I am amazed to recall that she was a choral singer who could safely be described as "icy" if not quite "frigid" which does cast a new light on the dream I began this entry describing!!
 
 

December 15, 2007
I dreamt of a man whose girl took to going to bars with a bear.  Although no men could stand this bear's company and even took to abstaining from honey, some ladies prone to flattery didn't mind listening to a bear expound on this or that.  You see, the bear only liked his own company, or liked to think that was so, but had a weak spot, or what he'd smugly call his weak spot, for young ladies.  Well, the man whose girlfriend seemed to be straying took consolation in the fact that the bear was very fat and ugly.  He had a face like a pot of potato soup!  And ticks!  Anyway, I've better things to do than worry about this girl, especially if her boyfriend's unconcerned. They can all wear berets and divine the future by flipping through Finnigans Wake for all I care!  I just don't like the idea of this bear.  If I start dreaming about him again I'm going to try to wake myself up. This is a dream with a moral: if you don't like something, stay the hell away from it.  It's like this boy named Donny whom everyone called Mark because Donny had a real keen sense of smell and so did this guy Mark who's dead and not really important to our story anyway.  Well, Donny, or Mark as we'll call him, used to keep away from his grandmother because he didn't like the way she smelled.  Mark didn't like the way women, in general, smelled and if you add to that his grandmother's girth and age plus the fact that she was a little senile or defeated or both and therefore not very clean, you've got a real stinker.  So, one day Mark's granny went to see her grandson because she was going to die soon and wanted to say goodbye.  Now, in the last few years Mark had made quite a name for himself in the truffle business.  He put many a pig out of business!  So when Granny found his house it was so big and beautiful that the poor old thing had what we'll call a "little accident".  She got up the courage to knock on the door but the smell had already slipped under the door, gone up the stairs, down the hall, and into Mark's nose which promptly fell off his head and led to his complete ruin.
 

December 14, 2007
Had insomnia last night.  Must speak with someone.  Kept hearing Mom in room above saying, "We knew something was wrong with Elsie when this morning she couldn't move her head."  Father saying, "I saw my first dildo lying in the street."  Strange because I don't live with my parents.
 

December 13, 2007
This is disappointing but I wanted to write about what happened after I sat down to a nice dream of ham stew with chunks of carrots and torn cabbage in it and peasant bread for dunking.  But I've completely forgotten!  I do recall a middle-aged woman for this or that reason rubbing butter in her hair and then drinking herself to sleep.  I think I was the TV program going on and on while she made loud and varied snoring and whistling noises.  My hand shakes as I write that ants woke her.  She enlisted the help of a barber who suggested she remove her blouse.  "Why should I remove my blouse?" she asked, beginning to cry.  The barber's mother, a withered up thing, sat on the hair-covered floor pressing the ants one by one as they neared.  When the barber wrestled his customer to the ground, a little mole poked out from his collar which his mother took for an ant.  She reached out with the nails of her thumb and forefinger like clippers or a beak and pinched it off.  The barber screamed and the woman with butter in her hair ran off to live her life.  When the old woman looked at the bit of flesh in her fingers she saw a tiny cock and balls.
 

December 12, 2007
I found another door in my house--should I open it?  It's MY house, after all.  Who am I kidding, I went in.  You can't judge yourself for how you behave in a dream, even if you don't know it's a dream.  In a dream we don't know how we've arrived at the moment so how can we be expected to rise above ourselves-in-the-moment?  Anyway, there was a very narrow room that had a chair at the end.  It was so narrow that both walls were scratched up when somebody forced a chair in there.  The strangest thing was, there was a girl sitting in the chair reading a book.  She was very trim and I'm not a bit embarrassed to relay, naked.  I said, "What are you doing in my house?" and she said, "I'm your landlady."  This was ridiculous so I said, "No you're not!"  She looked me up and down and gave me a nice smile.  She said, "If I'm not your landlady then why am I sitting here in your house?"  I had to admit I didn't know.