This notebook, as what it is, in itself, is pretty important to me. As you'll notice from the pictures in these notebook prefaces, I did all my dream journals from this point forward in top-bound, 6 x 9 inch steno books. This is the first steno book like this that served as a dream journal for me.
This notebook is also probably the last "easy" notebook I will transcribe. I numbered all my dream books in November of 2012, when I started this blog. But I've noticed two problems. First of all, my numbering goes 1, 2, and then 4, 5, etc., to 22. There is no notebook 3. I've been trying to figure out why this is.
It might just be because I made a horribly stupid mistake in my numbering. I wouldn't put that past myself.
But possibly it's also because in notebook 2, I used the notebook, for about the first two-thirds of the book, in a different way. I would wake from my dreams and immediately sketch out the dreams in the dream journal. Then, during the day, I would fully write out my dreams in my day journal. I may also have done this for the later dreams of notebook 1. I'm not sure yet.
So I'm assuming, though I'm not completely sure, that my intention was for me to treat notebook 2 as notebook 2, but also to treat the day journals holding my complete dreams as a collective "notebook 3." But no writings I've found have pointed to this having been my intention when I did my numbering in November of 2012.
Nevertheless, my plan for notebook 2 (and possibly the later dreams of notebook 1) will be to transcribe as faithfully as possible the sketched-out dreams, but then also to include the fully-written dreams from my day journals in the same entry. This is necessary, as some of the sketched out dreams are completely telegraphic, incoherent, etc. It's also helpful, as I do plan someday (probably not soon) to transcribe the dreams I recorded in my non-dedicated journals -- at least between October of 2001 and March of 2004. And it might be nice for people to see why that will be such a task. The dreams in my dream books are intentionally succinct. The dreams in my day journals from earlier times are as fleshed out as possible.
But another problem I've recently found is that, while numbering my dream journals in November of 2012, I completely left out one of my dream journals. This would -- I believe, have rightfully been notebook 20. It covers dreams from May 31st to July 14th of 2009. I have an idea or two as to why this dream journal was left out -- psychological reasons why I may have unconsciously omitted it. But it's still shocking to me. The notebook itself is interesting. I filled all the other notebooks. But this book is only maybe about one-third filled. I actually do know the reason for this. I'll probably talk about it later.
So this whole project -- which, upon beginning it four and a third years ago, I thought was going to be so coherent, consistent, unified, and focused -- has three, if not more, major gaps, inconsistencies, and problematic areas. First, I'm missing at least one entire dream journal. I know I lost one of my dream journals during some drunken night. I may have lost two, actually, between 2006 and 2008. Second, I've completely left out an entire dream journal that is not lost, so that, someday, I'll have to come back to it. Third, I've numbered my journals in a weird way, either on purpose or by accident. Fourth, I will have to break the closed-system of this project by transcribing some stuff from my day journals instead of just from my dream journals.
None of that matters, really. But I think it goes to show -- I thought it was just downhill from here with this project. But I think I'll actually have some hard work to do in piecing together the final notebooks.
Notebook 4 marks a relatively short period of time -- about two and a half months. During this time, my living situation was pretty stable. I lived in Harlem, as I've explained in the preface to notebook 5. Basically, I was working an Americorps program with the New York City Parks. I was earning a "living" stipend of $7.50 per hour for 35 hours a week of work. I found a rented room in Harlem for $125 per week. It ended up being a nightmare. I discussed some of the situations in the preface to notebook 5. I could discuss many, many more. But I won't, for the time being.
And my time at my rented room in Harlem wasn't completely terrible. It has to be noted that I entered almost all the dreams in this notebook in the mornings from that rented room in Harlem. "At home in Harlem" is a constant phrase in the entries below.
I also talk in the preface to notebook 5 about the NYC Americorps program I was in at this time. The program ran from November of 2004 to November of 2005. During this time notebook 4 marks, the NYC Americorps program I worked with was largely focused on helping both the ecologists and the park rangers at Inwood Park, at the very northern part of Manhattan. With the park rangers, there wasn't always a ton of stuff to do, as I recall. I did a lot of studying. I think there was some training I did as well. This training eventually led to me doing a lot of high school education programs in the spring and summer. I also did a lot of ranger work -- i.e. heading out into the park and monitoring it, or just going out and doing cleanup work.
During the winter my crew and I also spent a lot of time at the parks doing snow removal work. A lot of times it felt like we were either another garbage crew or another snow removal crew. There's nothing wrong with that. Obviously that's what the parks needed. But we would also, largely in Inwood park, be involved with some ecology projects -- either weed removal or erosion control projects.
During one of the weed removal projects we had in Inwood Park, while we were all on an isolated section of the park overlooking the Hudson River, my crew chief, SM, called out to the rest of the crew that he saw a "hawk" flying over the river. Even this early on, SM was not taken very seriously by anybody. So nobody really thought he was seeing a "hawk." But I at least wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. And, to my surprise, instead of seeing a "hawk" (I'd assumed SM meant a red-tailed hawk), I saw a bald eagle! It was the only bald eagle I saw during the Americorps program -- though I'd seen many other interesting birds. But the bald eagle flying over the Hudson River is probably one of the greatest nature memories I have in my life.
I think this memory resonates for years and years in my dreams. You'll notice how I'm always calling things out and pointing to things in my dreams, with that same sense of wonderment SM seemed to have when he called out the "hawk." There was just something very powerful about the entire experience, naturally and socially.
SM was a really nice guy. But he probably wasn't best suited for being a crew chief. You'll see throughout the dreams in notebooks 4 (and maybe 5 and 2) how weird he is in my dreams. A lot of that stuff is a direct reflection of him in waking life. Sometimes we would drive around for hours. We'd be assigned to go somewhere to work. But SM would drive us all over town, making up all kinds of excuses for not getting us where we needed to go. We wouldn't arrive at our sites until almost lunch sometimes. Then SM would make excuses for us to leave after only a couple hours of work. Some of us complained about this. The problem eventually went away. But it was really horrible at first.
I was also occasionally distressed by the people I worked with. The NYC Americorps program was, compared with other Americorps programs I know about, pretty ambitious. There were five crews, one for each borough, assigned to help the parks department in its three main divisions (rangers, ecology, and horticulture) in all five of NYC's boroughs.
Our program was pretty diverse, and I'm not sure of the entire thought process that went into forming our team. Some of the volunteers were Americorps volunteers, i.e. there for Americorps reasons. Others were college students -- literally working Americorps during the day and going to schools in NYC at night -- who came to the program partly because they believed in it and partly because they wanted to get the scholarship at the end. Others were people who were signed on to the program as part of a volunteer-to-work jobs program through the park. So they were just working in the program as a stepping stone for a job with the parks. Others were people who had run into trouble with the law and were either in jail or on probation and were doing the program as a good behavior thing.
I had come into the Americorps program for a couple reasons. First, I was still trying to devote myself to nature and poetry. So I wanted to be involved with work that would allow me to immerse myself in nature. But I wanted to live in New York. I had been gone on and off for about three and a half years. And I wanted to stay in New York. So I was happy to work this Americorps program. I eventually thought I would be able to work in the NYC Parks as a career. That didn't work out.
Second, I felt like I hadn't done a great job on my previous Americorps program, which was with Bandelier National Monument, near Los Alamos, New Mexico. I was going through a lot of struggles in that program. In fact, I ended up spending about two weeks in the mental hospital during the course of that program. But I was also so dead-set on focusing on poetry, mysticism, etc., that a lot of times I'd kind of given only a halfhearted effort to my Americorps work. My new idea was to immerse myself in the work, because through experience, wholehearted experience, I would be able to find deeper meaning in nature. So I wanted to test out this new idea with the NYC Americorps program.
But I was also feeling a little stifled by low-paying work and the feeling that I often wasn't taken seriously by my superiors. There were some managers in the department who paid attention to me and taught me a lot and discussed a lot with me. But a lot of times the situation was pretty hard to bear.
And a lot of my crew mates and I really didn't have any sympathy. A lot of times, many of my crew mates didn't even want to be there. They were always looking for ways to stay in our crew van, ditch our assignments, run off to places in the city to do something else, etc. They all liked me. And I liked them. But we just didn't have much to talk about.
Thankfully I did have some crew mates (like KB, who you'll see a lot of in my dreams, and MG, who pops up here and there) who did have sympathy with me. It was good to have them around.
But I was also, outside of work, watching a lot of my other friends succeed in other ways. Some of my friends, like L, were graduate students in the arts at prestigious universities. Others, like Y, were filmmakers who had already shown their work, for instance, at the Museum of Modern Art. Others were performers or animators on one level or another. Others, like R, were no longer in the arts but were heavily involved in politics and were working jobs where they made a lot of money.
And here I was -- just watching myself at age twenty-seven, apparently wasting my life away. I was "devoting myself to nature and poetry." But, really, I was just some guy who was too lazy to submit his writings after two or three rejections per manuscript and who just, apparently, didn't have the guts to make it in the arts world. I wasn't devoting myself to nature. I was sitting in a van with a bunch of people who didn't want to work, anyway. I'd come to New York about six and a half years earlier. At that time I was working at the Ben & Jerry's in Times Square and a cafe in Grand Central Station. And it didn't seem to me like I'd pulled myself up from that level at all in six and a half years.
I think you'll see that a lot of the dreams in this notebook express my feeling of being trapped. And I think that, in a lot of ways, this feeling of being trapped is a reflection on these emotions. The "snow cold hell" dream is a good example of this.
But there are other dreams, such as the "house of flying daggers 2" dream and the "escape from the doctor's office" dream where I'm escaping doctors, who have also trapped me.
The "escape from the doctor's office" dream relates directly to a somewhat famous doctor in New York, at least in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dr. Zizmor. He was famous for treating acne. I had really bad acne between 1998 and 2001 -- so bad my face would just spontaneously crack open and gush blood. And I never really got over my acne completely, though I would say that since about 2014 it's been almost completely cleared up. I saw Dr. Zizmor because I'd seen his ad on the subway. And I liked him a lot. But I stopped seeing him in 2001 when he'd kept me waiting in his office for an entire day -- for the second time in a row. His son, on that second time, was working the front desk, and he kind of egged me on to get angrier and angrier, until I finally exploded and probably almost had security called on me. The imagery in the "escape from the doctor's office" dream is very much like that experience.
But I think the "house of flying daggers 2" and "escape from the doctor's office" dreams express a negative feeling I've had about psychiatry ever since I started going to therapy, probably when I was eleven or twelve. Psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, etc., all seem to be "experts" at one thing and one thing only: prescribing medication. They don't really want to talk about psychology. If anything, they only want to talk about daily life. Not because it matters. But because the more they manipulate people into talking about daily life, the more they can skirt deeper issues. It has always seemed to me that a relationship with a psychologist is an obligation from the outset -- i.e. I always feel I have the obligation to give the psychologist the benefit of the doubt at first and then to stick with the relationship. But it doesn't seem like the psychologist has any obligation.
I think this sense of being trapped in my dreams is a feeling that I have a lot of issues I want to work through, combined with a feeling that I'll never actually find anybody to genuinely help me work through these issues.
A lot of the themes that were strong in notebook 5 are strong in notebook 4, though maybe a little bit different. The self-image themes are a little different. There are some dreams where I'm dirty, or dreams where I and my house are dirty. But in notebook 5, the dirtiness often relates to my transvestism. In notebook 4, it seems like my dirtiness is independent of my transvestism. It's also interesting to not that in some dreams, as well, such as the "bad shoes marathon" dream, I am kind of sharing my situation with other people who are at the same level as I. We all have dirty shoes or bad shoes.
It is interesting to see how and where shame over transvestism plays a role in my dreams. In the "bathroom studies" dream, I'm studying in a women's bathroom in a college dorm. But I'm trying to act natural about it. This is actually an echo of my time in college. I hate to admit this, but -- late at night, when I was in the dorms in my freshman and sophomore years at college -- I would sneak down to the laundry rooms in my dorm. I would see whether any girls had left their clothes in the dryers. I would steal one or two pairs of panties if they did. I usually knew whose clothes the clothes were, by the jeans, shirts, etc. So I knew when I was getting a pretty girl's pair of panties, etc. Eventually girls started noticing stuff going missing. They started taking out their clothes instead of leaving them in the dryers all night, and they would post a girl at a desk, to study, even late at night, to watch the clothes and make sure they didn't get stolen. So I eventually stopped stealing the panties. So you can see what an echo this dream is. And what a pervert I am.
It's also interesting to see how I have two transvestism dreams involving Kmart: the "may the force be with super kmart" and "kmart lingerie stalkers" dreams. As I've mentioned before, I've known I was genderqueer since I was nine. But I started acting out transvestism, as well as forming a doll fetish, when I was eleven. And at the age of eleven, being a home-schooled child who was almost always left home alone, as soon as I started expressing my transvestism, I started leaving home in the middle of the day and going to Kmart, where I would go into the women's lingerie section and steal panties. I didn't steal the panties because I didn't have money. I stole them because I was afraid to have a cashier see that I was buying them. I probably stole dozens of pairs of panties between the ages of eleven and twelve. At some point, when I was twelve or thirteen, I stopped being afraid of buying panties. I always had some job, so I always had enough money to buy a tape or a CD... or some lingerie... So I stopped stealing panties and just bought them. But the Kmart dreams are very much a reflection of this.
There are also some transvestism dreams I don't know what to think of. They have to do with a double-nature. These dreams are the "two negligees" and "two lingerie departments" dreams. I don't know what they mean. But I find this double-nature sort of interesting.
I think there are also some interesting lesbian dreams. In some dreams, I am a boy among lesbians -- which I basically was in waking life, as my crew mate and good friend KB was a lesbian and would often invite me to parties at her house, where I would be the only boy or one of few boys in a room full of lesbians. I don't think KB ever recognized this, but I wasn't "just fine" with being around her friends. I actually identified with her friends. I've always thought of myself as feminine-identifying, even though I've really stopped thinking about ever becoming a woman. I'm fine being me. But at my core I am feminine-identifying, somehow. So I think a lot of the lesbian dreams I have are attempts to reconcile this weird tension I always have of being sort of split -- genderqueer -- identifying as a boy, basically, but also identifying as a woman.
There is a lot of mysticism in these dreams. I'm actually surprised by the number of lucid dreams I have in notebooks 4 and 5. I honestly don't remember having had that many lucid dreams.
But what I would notice about these dreams is that the mysticism is very dark in some dreams. The "highest heaven society" is a dream all about a cannibal cult disguising itself as a Christian society. And the "satanic pool" dream is also very dark. There are some other dreams that have that same darkness. There are some dark and violent dreams in notebook 5. But I don't think they have this element of organized religion or society to them.
There is one dream in notebook 4 that I do see as pre-visionary. It's the dream where I get hit in the head with a Belgian block and mugged. I don't really know whether I believe in precognition. But I do believe that my dreams view the future. The future doesn't have to be viewed through precognition in a mystical sense. I can preview things in my personal future by understanding my own personality well enough. And I can preview things in society's future in the same way. Dreams are spontaneous and creative. So I often thing they're not logical. But I think the logical side, boosted by unfettered creativity, often has the ability to spear forward a lot more accurately into the future, so that dream images seem uncannily precognitive.
Anyway, I do think that the Belgian block dream previews my getting mugged on January 1st, 2011. I'm pretty sure my brain was damaged that day, as stupid as that sounds. It probably took about four years for the back of my head to stop hurting altogether. And I really feel like my emotions changed after that day. I was a lot less able to hold things in. And my paranoia came out on the surface a lot easier. That mugging precipitated a lot of other emotional events in the first half of 2011. When I look back on them, they were all good things. But I just couldn't handle good things happening to me. And I was just having a terrible time handling my emotions altogether. So in July of 2011 I had a nervous breakdown that lasted until January of 2012, when I came back home to Denver. I think the Belgian block dream is a really simplified preview of some of that stuff.
I have also mentioned in the prefaces for a lot of later notebooks how I reflect, as I get six months, a year, etc., separation from the NYC Americorps program, on the program in my dreams. But I notice a lot of reflection into the past, namely my time in Albuquerque in 2004 and my time in Flagstaff and Los Alamos in 2001 to 2003, in these dreams. I see the old desert images, the old desert town images, etc. So it's interesting to see this next layer of reflection into the past.
Another dream image I find interesting in this notebook is the "new family tree" dream. I must have heard this idea somewhere in the past. But I still find this idea interesting. Each person is the beginning, in one sense, of a new family tree, while also being a part of an old family tree. In this dream my friend R and I discuss this idea. And I think that's important. One reason R and I bonded so well is that we were both trying so hard to individuate from our families. We both love our families passionately and want, just as passionately, to individuate ourselves from them. I think the idea of a "new family tree" is an idea R would love.
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