(11/13/04) verbal trick; the bad comedian; the skull comedian; soccer mountain; pimples won't go away; i couldn't stop peeing

(Entered in paper journal at 6 AM, likely at my friend R's house in Brooklyn.)

Dream 1

Stood in front of house, possibly went into house and stole things. Drove or walked away, realized left DVD or CD playing. Drove back to house, by my mom's best friends son TYM home, knew I stole (?), tried to play verbal trick on me while he watched DVD in kitchen.

Dream 2

"Bad" performer at bar becomes worse on purpose. Sings weird songs and makes crazy jokes. I get it after a few seconds and laugh. Everybody else (possibly my improv comedy team from college?) gets angry. I stand up for the guy.

Now something like a magic show. Lights dimmed to red. Man pulls white rope off of huge bottle. Says he's going to take white rope home. Everybody shouts, "No! It's Stan's! It's Stan's!"

Next trick. we all have candles. We're supposed to light them. I llight match at back of table to help people around me. Candle never come. I bring up match. Burns my finger. I pick up other matches. Some are made of iron.

Dream 3

Trapeze show can't remember. Then flaming, large, golden, skull outside on steps. Now like that didn't happen, trapeze show ends, huge golden skull drops from ceiling about ten or twenty feet. Everybody afraid. large candle hovers in front.

Skull begins to speak. Serious at first. Then funny. Everybody laughs. Old comedian. But something wrong happening.

Outside. I walk down steps. Lots of pretty girls walking away, having been gathered around something.

Place like Times Square now. I walk across street, float over grease spot on sidewalk, keep floating over telephone booth.

Think about Pylon. Wonder, What was the third story Faulkner was to put in that novel? Try to remember even an anecdote.

Dream 4

Friend PD chasing orange soccer ball up and down green field in front of lawny mountain. She...

(Paper journal entry.)

Six dreams (fragments) remembered from last night. I'll get down the "last three" first, as I don't have them written in The Ghost Book.

Dream 4

My friend PD kicked an orange (?) soccer ball up and down a short field at the very foot of a mountain the facing slope of which was like somewhat craggy yet sharply demarcated lawns. She got a very good workout from it. I watched from above. She would move into and out of sight.

PD was my boss. She now let "us" go for lunch. I saw a few people. coworkers, in the distance, walking up the slope. I may have seen them right before I "knew" PD called lunch, and I may have wondered why they had gone off before lunch was called.

I now started down the slope I was on to walk up and over the tall mountain, the peak of which was a blue-grey stone capped thinly with snow. I thought, Oh, this workout won't impress PD. She's still running up and down the field. She'll think I'm pathetic.

Dream 5

I looked at my face in the mirror. I had a couple flesh-colored, cystic pimples on my right cheek. I was very tan, and so was my acne. I looked away, thinking something like, It's not XXXXX (can't read the word any longer), so they'll go away and I'll forget about them. I now looked back and saw that I had maybe six or seven pimples. These all wouldn't go away. They would only increase.

Dream 6

I was peeing. I couldn't stop. There were people all around me in other rooms, sleeping. The toilet bowl was huge, so huge it sloped up like a urinal. My urine was clear, and it jetted out of me, though I'm not sure I could see my penis or myself at all. I was really beginning to panic. But suddenly I thought something strange like, Oh, yeah I forgot I drank so much water. This isn't unusual.

***

The first three dreams seem pretty well written  in the Ghost Book. I'll just note some things.

***

Dream 1

The house was tall, with pale- or white-painted siding, in a really calm, suburban neighborhood. The blue of the day now seems all strangely diffused, almost polarized or negativized. The lawn was short, scraggly, dry grass, though it felt nice and clean, although (!) there were chunks of paper and trash sparsely littering it. I think this is what I was stealing.

The inside of the house was nice, like the big house my dad lived in in San Diego when I was in high school, or like the house my friend Y's mom lived in when I'd first met Y in college. But it wasn't quite the same. It felt tight or confined, like the townhouse R, Y, BR, and I lived in in my last year of college.

TYM sat on some stool in the kitchen. The "verbal trick" was some kind of trap game having to do with the DVD or CD playing. I had thought that if I could switch the DVD or CD at some smooth moment, I would be able to mask over the fact that I had been in the house and that I was in the house right now. But if I switched the DVD or CD at my old time there would be some kind of jump in the transition, and it would be obvious to TYM that someone other than he was in the house. It would be obvious that it was I because the DVD or CD that was playing was something that only I would watch. Thus it would be obvious also that the person who changed the CD or DVD had been in here before, to set up the CD or DVD.

TYM knew, though, before I had even come back, that I had been in his house, simply because of the CD or DVD playing. His "verbal trick" was trying to get me to admit it. It was actually more like taunting.

I heard our conversation all through the house as I tried to get out, though TYM stayed in the kitchen. The house got darker and darker.

Dream 2

The bar was dim and clean, classy, shiny, and very lonely feeling. The bar went all the way around three walls. Liquor lined all three walls on shelves extending from beautifully polished mirrors illuminated from below by beautifully wafting, yellowish, incandescent light.

My improv team (?) as an audience sat along the bar along the right wall. Now by some point I had gotten off my seat and sat on the wide, spacious, clean, black floor, even rolling around at some point. At another point I walked to the left bar and looked at the liquor, which was displayed almost like in the finest of china hutches, or rather in the quietest museum cul de sac of cases displaying Egyptian charms and artifacts.

When the lights dimmed I was back with the audience, who were still giving the comedian a hard time, even though I stood up for him. The white rope was around a Grand Marnier-type bottle that was about three feet tall. the rope was around it like a wide-meshed net. When the man took the rope off, it was like the rope was floating in the same shape, though it also seemed like the rope was completely and/or partially limp.

The table in the center of the room may have been covered with an elegant, white tablecloth. The only light now was candlelight from candles somewhere on the table.

The iron matches were like polished, black-grey, steel toothpicks or old tools you might find in a Swiss Army knife. One in particular had a shape like this:

where the top was like a densely bristled brush, though the whole thing wasn't taller than one and a half inches.

All the pieces were hot, as if they had all been lit, but had all burnt out before the candles had reached the people. But I knew if I was going to light people's candles I had to get over the burning sensation of matches when they get close to the skin.

Dream 3

The place where the show was was enormous, tall. It reminds me of the coliseum where they hold the circus (?) in Denver. The light was mainly red and a golden incandescent.

The skull was about six or seven feet tall and a deep gold with real-looking eyeballs in the sockets. The accident had to do with the performer basically boiling up inside the skull due to some kind of heat as opposed to electricity that drove the skull's actions. In the performance, the skull dropped and hung from the ceiling just low enough to hover right in front of the upper levels of crowd. It was also over by the crowd, not in the center or near the stage.

I heard at some point and from somewhere a voice lilke a TV announcer (like Bob Costas) saying that some kind of water or liquid casing or pool had been made for the comedian in the skull, so as to buffer him from most of the heat from the internal flame driving the skull. But I think the candle which descended to hover in front of the skull had not been accounted for. The skull may even have started to melt. I don't really know what happened, if anything happened.

Outside, I walked down steps like the steps for the post office at Penn Station. Something had smashed into, or else something smashed had been placed at, the left corner at the foot of the stairs.

A bunch of beautiful girls in outfits that looked like lingerie with skirts were walking away from this unseen thing. The only girl I can remember now was brownish-blonde with golden-tan skin. She wore a black lace bustier with pink fringes and XXXXX (can no longer read this word) and a black miniskirt.

I walked caddycorner across the street. The only building I remember now is a theater building with rows and rows of smaall, incandescent bulbs and red bulbs as outlining and lettering along the enormous, clunky overhang/awning (?). I hovered just below the underside of this overhang.

The scenario about Pylon, and I "saw/read" this as an actual interview with William Faulkner, was that Faulkner had written three stories which were supposed to intertwine to make Pylon, but that the "third" story had taken up too much space. So he'd clipped that one out, expanded it, and made it into another novel. But I couldn't get that story straight, somehow.

I kept trying to find the third story in my mind. Then I tried to find (i.e. remember) even the second story. I even tried to do this by remembering page numbers and paragraphs. Now it all seemed to be just one story, and I wasn't sure whether the anecdote I was thinking of was about Faulkner at all.

(12/21/04) missing person; no more oddball comics

(Entered in paper journal at 6 PM at home in Harlem.)

Dream 1

I was in some huge, dark forest that also seemed like a basement. I picked up something that "didn't" glow but which I could see in the dark "as if" it did glow. It was a shoe or a rock. But it had a look like a sock puppet painted as a snake. And it apparently also was a snake. But it was also, I learned from some strange narration, the shoe of a missing child or young man.

The narration went on to tell how this missing person had been starved and then frozen, thrown into something icy, either a muddy crevice or a lake or possibly even a glacier. I could now see the body in negative and as if it were standing.

Now the location was certainly a basement with all the lights shut off. But the negative image "glowed" away from me and up an incline in the basement floor. I was now something like the missing person and "myself" going to save the missing person.

I was in a dimly lit basement that had a wide common room that led to a beige or pale orange hallway that almost instantly got dark, though I could see a few doorways to rooms along its walls. I was to go down this hallway as the missing person had. But I knew that "a father" (not necessarily the missing person's father) was lurking in wait. "A mother" was likely also waiting somewhere. They may have been waiting cruelly to kill me. They may also just have been suspicious of me and have wanted to question me to make sure I wasn't trying anything shifty. I didn't go down the hallway. I looked to my right and saw either "a father" or my mother.

But suddenly I was walking through my mom's basement. My brother was missing. We were afraid he'd been killed or that he'd committed suicide. I was sure we'd find his frozen body in the basement.

There was a couch by a wall. Behind the couch, up against the wall, was a huge pile of clothes. I had started yelling, "Brother! Brother!" Now I screamed it as I pulled the shirts off the pile. I found my brother's frozen body. I don't know whether he was dead.

I now sat on a couch in a living room. To my right was my second oldest nephew. To his right was my mom. On the floor, to my left, facing me and playing with some toys, was "my oldest nephew." To his right may have been my sister.

My second oldest nephew said something really intelligent, way above his age group's speaking and cognitive abilities. He then stood up and walked away. I was impressed by what my nephew had said. I asked my mom something about him. My mom may have told me my nephew was twenty-two months old. Now "my oldest nephew" may have looked up and justified why or explained how all this had just happened.

Dream 2

Fragment. I looked at a school desk in an otherwise empty room with wood-lined walls and heavy sun coming in through the windows. The desk had a white top. On it was a date, like "10-20-03." There was an old-days funny-animal comic book drawing, something like Mighty Mouse. Somehow all this made me understand that Oddball Comics was stopping, possibly because Scott Shaw! had died, possibly because Scott Shaw! had simply decided to retire from the comics industry altogether.

(8/23/08) zit as sex toy; i'm a lesbian with my female friend; lured into dead end

(Entered in paper journal at 9:30 AM at Connecticut Muffin in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I had three small, dry bumps on my face. I thought they were zits, so I "popped" one of them. It peeled off my face like a film or a dry piece of paper.

There was a hard ball of "pus" inside the film. I pulled it out and looked at it. It grew, became a little gooey, and took on a weird appearance. It was about two inches long, bean-shaped, with prongs coming out of it. The "body" itself had some consistency, but the prongs were soft and flaky. It was almost like a toy, maybe even a sex toy, except that it was gooey, like phlegm or pus.

Dream #2

I walked into a small side hallway (to my left) in some place like a mall or perhaps like the shopping areas in Grand Central. A lingerie shop caught my eye. I looked in as I walked past, trying not to be conspicuous, but interested in seeing if the store's style was something I wanted to wear. But most of it seemed to be things like camisoles, a kind of rigid, fancy style that I didn't like.

The hallway was very small and narrow. A decent amount of people walked through the hallway in both directions, mostly young women. All the shops in the hallway were lingerie shops. I knew I would want to stop into one, and I hoped nobody I  knew would see me.

I turned right, into another dim hallway. I saw a rack of panties, of a cloth, cottony, non-stretching fabric. I thought these panties would be fun to wear, but I realized they'd probably be smallish and awkward on my body, like most feminine-shaped but inflexible articles of clothing always ended up being for me. Plus, I felt too fat to wear those panties.

I grabbed the waistband of my own underwear at the back. I realized I was actually wearing a pair of panties like the ones I had been looking at just now, so that I really didn't need another pair, especially sine this pair already fit less than perfectly.

I now realized that, in fact, all I was wearing were these panties and a matching bra or camisole!

I continued walking down the hallway. The atmosphere alternated between a dimmish, plaster-walled hallway like a hallway in a small, dingy office and a marble-walled hallway, like in a well-built or fancy building.

I turned right, into what may have been the end of the hallway. It was a very clean, white-floored, white-walled lingerie shop that also seemed like an enormous dressing room. There were a lot of girls there, but the place wasn't crowded. The lingerie was all brightly colored, like summer, or like sweetgum leafs in the fall.

I looked at myself in a mirror. I was wearing a pair of vivid pink, almost hot pink, gingham panties and a matching shirt/tank top. I probably looked just like a woman. I might actually have been a woman.

Now I saw KB, an old friend of mine and one of the people I'd worked with on my Americorps program in 2005. I tried to hide myself. But KB didn't seem to mind how I looked. She was more interested in being able to see me after such a long time. But I was still upset to see her while I looked this way.

We were in an adjoining room, which was even more like a fitting room than the last room had been. There was a door outside on the back wall. It seemed to lead out to a foresty area, like around the visitor center at the National Park where I'd done my Americorps program in New Mexico in 2002. The door was open. Bright, comfortable sun flowed in.

KB was sitting on a deep-blue-green couch. The couch was full of girls. I seemed to be having a conversation with KB as myself. But as the girl I also (?) was (?) I seemed to be cuddling with KB and kissing her.

Dream #3

I was walking down a street in a relaxed shopping district type area (which kind of reminds me of some shopping block in Queens). I was on the shady side of the street on a sunny, slightly breezy day. The sidewalk was busy with people, but the overall mood was relaxed.

But I soon found myself constantly having to get out of the way of different groups of people. The first group was a group of white teenage boys, all tan, with golden blonde hair, very cheerful. Then it was two or three tall, smart-looking black men, who were all laughing with each other. I didn't feel stressed out by these people, but I felt overwhelmed, like I was avoiding a tide which would sooner or later carry me away.

These groups of people had been coming toward me. Now I had to get out of the way of a person who was walking in the same direction as I. He was a white man, maybe in his early twenties. He might have been walking with another man who was like him. He carried a bundle of twigs on his shoulder. He had straight, brown-black hair and olive skin, and he wore a dull, navy blue shirt and dull, army green shorts.

The twigs, which the young man might have been carrying for his mother, were supposed to serve the same decorative purpose as cherry blossom twigs or willow twigs. In fact, I even called them willow twigs. The wood was a rich tan color, like on young mulberry trees, and the leafs were compact and vivid green, ridged very tightly, somehow (not completely) like rose leafs.

I had to swerve completely off the sidewalk to avoid this boy, and even as I did this, the edges of the branches still brushed against me, as if the boy were purposely trying to get back in my way.

The sidewalk was now in the sunlight. I walked behind a mailbox and then back onto the sidewalk. I was walking toward a subway entrance (a lot like the PATH train entrance at Hoboken). The building was brick, very clean, topped with a pristine, arching, aluminum or stainless steel structure. The building seemed to back into a grocery store parking lot. This area was even busier, like there were a fair somewhere nearby.

A young boy cut in front of me as I headed down the stair. I got competitively upset and hustled to cut him back off. But as we went down the stairs, which curved to the left, it was very hard for me to walk. It was, in fact, hard for me to move my legs at all.

The young boy and I seemed to be going at the same pace. I thought I could do something like slide down the handrail or even hold onto the handrail and "fly" or "hover" down to beat the boy. The boy seemed to have the same idea. But when I saw he was going to ride the railing down, I decided not to. I decided that riding the rail would be cheating. I could beat the boy, I thought, just by moving quickly, or perhaps by flying.

Nevertheless, I grabbed onto the railing like I was going to ride down it. But it was all covered in brown packing (?) tape. I could feel that, underneath the tape, the railing was broken in a lot of different places. It wouldn't be practical to ride down at all.

Now I was on the right side of the stairwell, where the boy had been. I was sliding down the railign, but the stairway was getting narrower and narrower. The stairway narrowed to a point and became a wall, I saw, before it even reached the actual floor of the subway platform. I'd have to hop the railing to get to the train.

The boy had stopped a few steps up from me, i.e. behind me. His mother had been calling him. He ran back up the stairs to meet her. Originally, I knew, the boy had been heading down the stairs to the train in order to take care of some task for his mother. But now it was like he was an overzealous boy who had headed for the train ahead of his mother, thinking he could be independent of her. Now he was being lightly scolded for having run ahead. The boy would have to go back up the stairs to his mother and then come back down with her.

But I also knew that the boy had run down the stairs to "trick" me. He wanted to rev me up into a competitive state so I'd get stuck in the exact position I was in at this moment -- facing the hallway that narrowed into a  blunt wall. The boy knew well enough to stop ahead of time and head back out of the station, never having had any intention of coming down to the level I was at.

I felt tricked, frustrated. But I still also had to catch the train that was arriving at this station. I was now more concerned with how to get over the railing so I could get onto the train.