(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.

(2/10/10) leaving a contrary woman

(Entered in paper journal at 6:15 AM, on B-train into work from Brooklyn.)

Dream #1

I was down in some place like a deep basement. The basement looked like the basement of a house, but I feel like it was taller and wider, and like it had been made for some kind of institution, perhaps a university. I sat on a couch.

A woman sat to my right, against the right arm of the couch. I may actually have been laid out on the couch, leaning my head against the woman's arm or lap. The woman was probably tall, blonde, very beautiful, and mature looking, maybe in her mid-thirties. She may also have been my girlfriend H.

The woman was flipping through a big picture book that was maybe eighteen inches wide and two inches thick. I feel like there may have been other people in the distance, watching us from some dark room, a room with walls painted black, like on a stage.

The woman began complaining about not doing well at some task. I may have tried to tell her she was doing well. But she yelled at me like I was stupid.

I looked up at her book. It was open to a page that looked like an ad (possibly set up to be part of an artist's portfolio in a journal like Artforum.) The left page may mostly have been white. The right page had a silvery wave shape which opened to a silvery rectangle, out of which drove a silvery, somewhat sporty-looking car. Below the car the word "SOLAR" was written in smooth, modern, sporty-looking letters, either blue or silver.

The woman continued yelling insults at me for having tried to make her feel better. Finally I was fed up with it. I yelled sharply at her to stop. She was surprised and silent for a moment. But now she spoke, in a somewhat gentler tone, telling me that she really didn't need to stop, after all, and that she could do whatever she wanted.

We had now stood up. We walked through a small, dark hallway and thn up into a sloped parking lot around a building. It was a sunny day, but we were shaded by trees. The building was white brick (?), maybe three or four stories tall. It seemed like a complex of doctors offices in a suburban neighborhood. It seemed to be at the top of a wooded hill (hence the trees and the rolling, sloping nature of the parking lot).

The woman continued talking about how she could do whatever she wanted and I'd always be there for her. But now she was younger, Asian, with coppery-tan skin and long, pale-coppery-blonde hair. She wore a blue summer dress with thick shoulder straps and white trim. She seemed very youthful and happy.

I was mad about the woman having said such things about me. We were walking (or just near?) a couple of black boys and one or two black women. The black boys were tall, skinny, dark, with closely shaved heads. they wore black t-shirts with prints on them, photos, probably, from a movie like Scarface. The black guys and girls all seemed to crowd around the woman.

We rounded left around a corner of the building, following a ramp- or road-like stretch of asphalt. At the end of the stretch I saw an exit off to my right, which appeared to go to a suburban residential area. I decided to take that exit, leaving the woman to herself. I didn't think she'd notice; she seemed pretty unaware of me already.

I was a little worried about the guys crowding around the woman. I was afraid they didn't have good intentions. But for some reason I decided to let her go anyway.