The dreams in this notebook occur during roughly one third of a one-year stint I did with an Americorps program I worked in with the New York City parks department. I discuss this program in my preface to notebook 6, and I will discuss it in more depth in the preface to notebook 2/3 (notebooks 2 and 3 blend together, as you'll see).
Basically, the program was an Americorps program with about twenty-five volunteers who were divided into five groups. The five groups were for each of the five boroughs in New York City: Manhattan, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. The five groups did work for each of the parks department's three main divisions -- park rangers, ecology, and horticulture -- within their respective boroughs. All of the divisions were understaffed, so we ended up providing much-needed help. But we ourselves were also provided with a broad knowledge of the parks department in return.
The period of my waking life marked by these dreams probably represents some of my most fruitful times with the Americorps program. As winter gave way to spring, we ended up being involved in a lot of planting and horticulture projects. I learned a lot about ornamental and wild plants. I also learned about and learned to love the art of horticulture. I was involved in some fun weed removal, garbage removal, and erosion control, and wildlife protection projects with the ecology department. I did a lot of park ranger presentations for high schools -- particularly A. Philip Randolph High School. I became very involved with some of the park rangers all over New York City. I helped on camping trips with the rangers and groups of high school students in some of the city's larger parks. I was involved with a street tree census that ended up taking me throughout the entire city, in all of its areas, since the parks department is in charge of all the city's street trees. And I was part of a roughly twenty-four-hour-long project called the Bronx River Bio Blitz -- a survey of wildlife -- flora and fauna in and around the Bronx River.
There were a lot of problems with the Americorps program, which I'll probably discuss in more detail in notebooks 2/3 and 4. But by this time, a lot of my crew mates were leaving the program. The main thing about the program was that people had to work 1,700 hours between November of 2004 and November of 2005. Some people worked a lot of hours so they could stop working for the program altogether by June or July. Other people, not really prepared for this type of program, dropped out, one by one. Other people were kicked out. So, as the crew numbers dwindled, all of us who remained were asked to help in other areas of the city. I ended up spending a lot of time in Staten Island, which was nice, as during lunch we would go to the beach. My lunches ended up being swimming sessions at the beach.
This period also marks the end of my time living in a rented room in Harlem. I'm sure I'll talk about this rented room more in the prefaces for notebooks 2/3 and 4. Basically, the crew I worked with handled the borough of Manhattan. This was a slight disappointment for me, as I really wanted to be on the Brooklyn crew. However, I ended up being really happy I was on the Manhattan crew. The Manhattan crew's meeting point for the beginning of each day was Morningside park. I wanted to find a place to live that was close to the meeting point. I ended up finding a rented room on 115th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, only two blocks away from the park.
You'll notice that a lot of the dream entries in this notebook were made from my place, generally between 5:30 and 6 AM. I remember my ritual even now of waking up, taking a shower, making some coffee, and writing my dreams. After I wrote my dreams I would walk to Morningside Park to meet my crew. As with many of my living places, there was a lot that I loved about my rented room in Harlem.
There was also a lot that I didn't love. The place itself, I'm pretty sure, was a rent controlled place that the family who ostensibly rented it got, I'm pretty sure, through housing assistance through the city. The family didn't live there. Instead, they turned the whole place into four bedrooms and a kitchen. Three of the four bedrooms were then rented out. The rooms weren't really bedrooms, but makeshift rooms constructed with pieces of drywall that didn't even rest flush with the real walls. The fourth room was a kind of spare room or storage room, to which the daughter of the family, a high school girl, would often bring boys after school so she could have sex with them. I would hear the daughter and her boyfriend in the room next to me.
There was a lot more kind of awful stuff about this place, which I'll save for other notebook prefaces. But just before I was leaving, one of my "rented roommates" started getting really weird. He lived next door to me and would always bash against my walls whenever he knew I was around. But he was pretty nice to my face. Anyway, he went months without paying any rent. He knew he didn't have to pay any rent. He told me so. He knew the weird arrangements of this place. He knew that there really wasn't any legal recourse the landlords had against him, since they weren't necessarily renting this place out legally. The landlords would come over all the time to try and get him to pay his rent. He'd just sit in his room, his bed, dresser, etc., blocking the door, which the landlords would even try to force open, and act like he wasn't home. He'd sometimes just sit barricaded in his room all day.
But another great thing about this rented room was its location. I was only five blocks up from Central Park North. On the weekends I would walk down through Central Park. I would go to one museum a week: either the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the Guggenheim, or one of the other museums on Central Park East. I would then walk over to Madison Avenue and browse through all the windows of the fashion and jewelry stores. I studied those storefronts the same way I studied the works of art in the museums. This was probably one of the greatest museum-studying periods of my life.
When I left this place -- I'm pretty sure right as this notebook was ending -- I asked my landlords to give me my security deposit back. They said they couldn't. At the end of it all, I was negotiating with the daughter, who was the only person in the family who really spoke English very well at all. By then I just decided not to worry about it. It seemed to me that I might possibly have been the only person in the place paying my rent regularly. It seemed like they might have really needed my money. So I just left the place and let the family have my security deposit.
I went to live for, I think, six weeks in Brooklyn, off Flatbush, at the apartment of my friend L. L was the girlfriend (now wife, I believe) of my friend R. R met L in early 2004, not long after my best friend Y divorced R and moved away. L and R's relationship developed quickly. L was a really intelligent woman. She was getting her master's degree in theater. She came from a somewhat wealthy Chicago family. She was about five years younger than I. But she was really accomplished. She was also very much into S&M fetish, especially bondage, rope fetish, whipping, and corset fetish, as was my friend R. They were a really good match for each other.
L was also a huge influence on me. She was the person who introduced me to Elliott Smith, Homestar Runner, and the TV show Arrested Development. She probably also revived my love for Star Wars. She was also a person who really, really cared about the dramatic arts. And she probably even influenced me more than I'd like to admit to start doing serious research for my dramatic writing. But she was also sort of a bully. My friend R was a bully. And I think he wanted a "mean girl" bully for a girlfriend. And R and L kind of saw me as a friend (R more than L) and, at the same time, a target for bullying. When the two of them ganged up on me, I just felt like an awful excuse for a human being, and I didn't even want to exist.
Anyway, L was invited to go to Hong Kong for six weeks with the family of one of her professors. She would babysit for the family as well as help her professor with some of his research work. L had recently moved out of her dorm room and into an apartment near Flatbush in Brooklyn. L had a cat. She asked me to apartment-sit and cat-sit while she was gone. The apartment was a studio, very small, but very nice, isolated from the other apartments in the building, and with high ceilings, so that I felt very peaceful and secure while I was there.
My waking life merged a lot with my dream life through mysticism. I will probably discuss this in much more detail as I get into notebooks 1 and 2/3, because at those times my drive toward mysticism was even stronger. But I studied over, almost obsessed over, mysticism at this point in time, too. And I think it shows, even more strongly than in my later dream notebooks.
One particular practice I start to notice a lot more of in this notebook is "spontaneous imagination." I learned this practice partly from the paranormal writers and partly from Carl Jung. For me, spontaneous imagination was a practice I would do at night, lying in bed, as I waited for sleep. It was a form of meditation. All through the day I had soaked in imagery, especially of environments, interior or exterior. Now I would lie in bed and let my mind wander. I would wait for new environments to form themselves in my imagination. As these environments formed themselves, I would do a little bit of give and take between consciously imagining myself acting in these environments and letting myself "instinctually" or unconsciously act in them, while I also let them surprise me by acting on me or in response to my actions.
The main purpose of these spontaneous imaginations was to kind of help me step into an out-of-body experience. I figured that my imaginary body was my astral body, and that if I let myself imagine, my imaginations would sort of carry me into some other place, where my astral body would actually be. But I also felt that if I could "create" these spaces, I could (seriously) create new worlds in which I could live -- maybe even all by myself. Or -- even more hoped for -- I could create a new, female body for myself to live in.
This thought process wasn't new to me. Since I was eleven and I discovered my transvestism (I knew since I was nine that I was genderqueer; and I knew since I was five or six that I was an "adult baby" or paraphilic infantilist), I would always create fantasies where I would exit my current body and disappear into a world where I could change myself through mental powers into the kind of woman I really wanted to be. So this whole idea of spontaneous imagination was just an extension of all these old childhood fantasies of mine.
But notebook 5 has actual instances of spontaneous imagination. Some of my spontaneous imaginations seemed actually to fade into dreams. At this point, I would record them in my dream books. If they didn't seem to fade into dreams -- if they just seemed to me like waking imaginations or reveries, I would just record them in my daytime notebooks.
Notebook 5 also has some very clear instances of lucid dreaming. I felt much the same way about lucid dreaming as I did about spontaneous imaginations. I felt like lucid dreaming was a sort of gateway to out-of-body experiences. So I worked on having lucid dreams for that reason. But I also felt like, if I got good enough at lucid dreams, I could just drop into those dreams altogether, finding, or creating, some sort of fantasy world in which I could be the kind of woman I really wanted to be.
For me, mysticism always connects with sexuality. So there's no surprise that there are so many dreams in this notebook that have to do with transvestism and being transgender or genderqueer. In a lot of dreams in this notebook, I am wearing women's clothes, but I am disappointed by how little I look like a woman. This often is because I am unshaven, or because I smell like a man, etc. But sometimes I look like an old woman instead of a young woman. In one dream, in fact, I look like Disney's Snow White's Evil Queen when she disguised herself like a beggar woman.
There are also a lot of dreams where I am excluded, evicted, or shunned by others because of my transvestism. And there are dreams where I, in shame, do disgusting things, such as defecate in the middle of a lingerie store, while dressed in women's clothes. This last dream is interesting to me, as, in 2009 and 2010, when I let myself live out my "adult baby" fantasies again, I would go to women's clothing and lingerie stores all around New York (such as a number of Victoria's Secret shops, the Kaori's Closet on Houston Street and American Apparel on Smith and Douglass in Brooklyn) and wear diapers, quite plainly, under the lingerie or other clothes I tried on and bought, in the dressing rooms, in front of dressing room attendants, and even out in the store areas as I went to go find other articles of clothes.
So there are a lot of dreams in this notebook that illustrate my anxieties around being able to "perform well" or "look good" as a transvestite. But there are also dreams in the notebook that illustrate my anxieties around performing poorly or looking bad in general. In particular, one of the last dreams of the book revolves around my having bad shoes and buying a new pair of shoes, which are also bad.
Some of this anxiety over my self image seems to spill over into having bad thoughts about people who are like me, i.e. queer people in general. So there are dreams where I say bad things about gay men and lesbians. But there are also dreams where I say bad things about women in general.
I have some interesting dreams about lesbianism in this notebook. And I think that's because of my own desires to have been a lesbian myself. But I think it's also because one of my best friends from my NYC Americorps program, KB, is a lesbian. She was one of the smartest people I knew. She was also strong, kind, generous, and chivalrous. She was attractive, regardless of how she presented herself. I had a huge crush on her. But she was quite open about her lesbianism -- I hung out with her and her girlfriend AN all the time. I knew I didn't really have a chance of being with her.
I think my friendship with R and L and my friendship with KB and AN would kind of blur in some of my dreams. KB and AN were like the "formative" friends I wish I could have had instead of R and L. So I think a lot of the lesbian S&M fetish relationships in some of my dreams is based on taking aspects of R and L and mixing them with aspects of KB and AN. I think there are probably other examples of this blending in my dreams.
I think that my self-image is also called into question in some of these dreams when I question myself as a writer. There are dreams when I myself am a writer or am writing things. There are other dreams where I see through the eyes of a writer, even a screenwriter in particular. And there are dreams where what a screenwriter or film director is doing reflects how I'm feeling about myself. In particular, the dream about Quentin Tarantino doing method acting by living as an ape in Africa. This dream can easily be seen as a self-criticism. I am focusing less on my writing and more on going out into nature and doing things that don't necessarily have to do with my efforts to become a professional writer.
This imagery also, again, points to an overall self-criticism, which is that I never put my full efforts into things. I work hard and I accomplish some great stuff. But when it comes to the final steps that will really put me over the edge and make me a true professional, in whatever I do, I always seem to chicken out. This is best illustrated in one of the earlier dreams of this notebook, where I get almost to the end of some really high balancing act and then suddenly decide just to jump off on some safe point instead of going the last few steps and completing the act.
I would say that each of these dream notebooks has dealt, in some way or another, with the transition or growth of my personality. This occurs in different ways in each notebook. In this notebook, I would say there's a huge fascination with an impending nuclear war or other apocalypse. There are strings of dreams near the end that deal with trying to escape from a nuclear war, trying to stop a nuclear war, or just coming to understand that there is really no way the nuclear war or other apocalypse can be avoided. I feel like this is an indication from my unconscious that my psyche is undergoing a massive change that I can't avoid.
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