Showing posts with label william faulkner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label william faulkner. Show all posts

Monday, March 20, 2017

(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.

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

(10/21/05) up with the good ol' south; new englander cult retreat

(No information on time or place of entry into paper journal.)

Dream 1

I went back for a walk through a mountain area where I had just been. I had come back to prove I knew some trees or plants as well as just to walk. But the weather had been dry and time was getting toward night and winter. All the leafs were changing color, even the pine needles, which were a bright blood red.

I was ashamed that I presumed in front of my friends to know everything about the plants in this area. Looking around now at the different colors, I realized I knew nothing. I insisted on walking through the forest, though, more than before, to vindicate myself.

Some of my friends tried to stop me, but they hesitated, then ended up encouraging me instead. They felt like, even though I was now refusing to say so, that I felt like not knowing the forest anymore opened me up to a lot of dangers. For instance, now, furiously rushing through the woods, I could see that many of the trees had decayed and were about to fall. I often rushed just under them before they fell.

Now I was in a car with BA, the leader of my Americorps NYC Parks program. BA was driving me down the road to a spot where I could walk back. It was pretty late. I worried that I wouldn't have enough time to enjoy the walk before it got dark. I also worried that I wouldn't have walked enough to have burnt off all the food I'd eaten.

I tried momentarily to figure out how I thought I'd have enough time for such a long walk before. Now BA and I drove through a small mountain "lodge" town. I knew BA was just going on one errand before he dropped me off.

We stopped at one place. Now we went to pick up one of my crew mates, KA. I was reading a book "by Faulkner" as we drove to KA's. Her place was a brown-painted, fake-wood townhouse. KA stood in the doorway, ready to go. She walked to the car.

Each page on the Faulkner book had at least one "line" where the words were in some way decorative. either they were a strange font or they were pictures or else sometimes the line was just a photograph.

When I finally realized this I looked up to see that in the window by KA's front door there were a photo-painting of Alanis Morissette and another of some other celebrity. The painting was like a silkscreen, and the skin and hair were different colors.

We pulled away from the house and circled past an old-timey gas station. One page of the book had a line where the letters were like wood slats on a fence, and they said something like "UP WITH THE GOOD OL' SOUTH," as if to ridicule Northerners.

Another page had a photo of people in the South engaged in some exclusivist activity. Now the photo was like a TV image. It was inside a police station or an army headquarters office in a small town. A guy wandered through small offices. He was big. He was hilding up the building and he was going to kill the people in it.

The "show" flashed back to a moment when the man had first gone crazy. He made out with some friend of his who was as huge and fat as he was.

Now "I" was one of the cops. I had a machine gun. I walked into the office where the man was holding his hostages. I had worried that he'd notice me before I got within firing range. But now I stood next to him, to his right. I lowered the gun (I had been holding it nose-up) right as he finally noticed me. I knew I had to fire now or he'd kill me.

Dream 2

I was crossing 20th Street at Depew, on the border, I suppose, of Lakewood and Edgewater in Colorado (i.e. essentially a road separating two suburbs not very different from each other, though one of them is my hometown/family town).

As I crossed the street a young businessman came up behind me and said how much he disliked the dryness of the Southwest. It was like he said the dryness was vulgar, and that the Northeast was more dignified by having humid weather.

I didn't tell the man I was actually walking to my mother's house. I told him I, too, lived in New England. He said he was on business. I now saw the man. He stood to my left. He was very tall, skinny, gaunt, with longish, ringed hair. He wore dark, grey-blue clothes.

We walked through the empty parking lot, past a wild patch of rabbit brush, which was very bright, even in the dim atmosphere. I said something like I was on business. He asked if I had come for the same thing he had come for, some big get-together or retreat in the woods.

We now walked on a thin trail in the woods, between stark walls of boulders. The man told me that at this retreat he was going to meet someone one more time and see if what he felt for that person was real. I thought this guy was too sentimental.

We now came to a nice cabin where some peers of mine sat. We had a conversation which I don't remember but which largely involved me, for shame, not mentioning any true facts about myself in front of the New Englander.

Now the New Englander was gone, and I was by myself in the woods. But now I was on the outskirts of some retreat. A group of loud, obnoxious people stood by a camp-style obstacle course. The retreat was some romantic getaway for gay people. In the distance was some big, fat, stubbly, bald guy that everybody made fun of because the guy thought everybody hated him, and because he was so lazy.

Now a guy walked away from a tree and went and took the man by the hand and walked him in front of everybody. The man told the big guy, "Now this time we're going to do it, okay? And if you aren't going to do it, tell me now, because I don't want to be hurt by you one more time."

The big guy said, "No, I'll do it, I'll do it. I'm ready."

They walked off to my right. As I turned to watch them I saw a lady beside me. She waited until they were out of earshot, then she laughed.

It wasn't until now that I realized the big guy was the New Englander, and that this was the person he had been talking about meeting "one more time." But somehow underlying the whole thing was a feeling of derangement. The big guy had almost no wits. He was slimy and gross and stupid and lazy and stubbly and fat, and yet he thought he was some kind of dainty, little thing, and everybody let him believe he was. It was like a cult mindset.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

(8/5/06) high rents for killers' caves; obvious classic literature and medieval pulp novels

(Entered in paper journal at 1:22 PM at Starbucks at Astor Place in Manhattan.)

Dream 1

I was on a journey down a cave (?) with other people, possibly my friend R and a woman. The cave had some quality like a haunted house in an amusement park, and even had features like in a house. Then there would be deep drops down.

We were possibly pursuing a bad person. He might have been killing people as he ran, while we were far behind. I was afraid of him because he could kill us. But I also wanted to get to him as soon as possible.

When we went down the drops I felt some hesitation from the people I was with. I yelled at them, near the end, "Just let yourself drop down! It's the only way to catch up!"

The people I was with were going down slowly, as if along the walls. I tried to drop down freely. But even I was somehow stumbling along the cave walls.

I got down to the bottom. I stood before a little hallway like in a house. The hallway was blocked off by a little children's barrier-fence, the kind that can be expanded to block the doorways between rooms in a house, and was full of human heads, maybe two or three heads deep. I "knew" the killer was here.

I was in the room next to this hallway. It was nice. A nice window showed a sunny day outside. The room had pale blue carpet and seemed kind of empty except a TV and video games. I went through a couple other rooms, looking for the family that lived here, to warn them about the killer.

I stopped at one point, realizing how quiet this place was. I thought to myself, The only other thing I'd like here is more private drapes, and I could live here pretty easily.

I was "called back" by a woman. I "walked back" to the living room. Apparently it was time to leave for the day, as if we came here regularly or had come here as part of some regular chore.

The house was now enormous, middle-class looking, but huge. I looked at the wall to my left. It gave the rental rate for places like this. I saw this place was rather expensive. A smaller place like this was $1,700 per month. A larger one (still maybe as large as this one?) was $2,400.

The woman who had called me sat at a dining table to my right. We headed toward the front door.

Dream 2

I sat by a woman in a big room. There was a lively group of people somewhere in the distance. The woman and I spoke about something smart. Then I turned my attention to a book. I read a little, the first couple paragraphs, which described a car trip, comparing it to some other harrowing or humbling experience.

Somehow I realized the book I was reading was The Grapes of Wrath. I thought, How obvious for someone to be reading The Grapes of Wrath. I thought the girl I was with must have been thinking that I was just trying, in an obvious and pretty conventional way, to look smart in front of her.

I was reading out of a huge anthology, like one I had in college. It had a pale tan paper cover with a little bit of a plastic feel to it. I flipped out of The Grapes of Wrath and tried to find something a little more unique to read.

I found Faulkner's The Wild Palms. I thought, I never realized that I owned a copy of The Wild Palms just by owning this book! But I didn't want to read The Wild Palms, either.

I realized I was just searching aimlessly. I forced myself to put the book away and just work on talking to the woman instead of trying to impress her with what I was reading. It just felt healthier to speak with the woman. I also felt like I was getting too obsessed with reading -- and with reading things I didn't even want to read.

But as I was putting down the book I flipped through the pages. my attention was caught by color plates of paintings by Maxfield Parrish or Edwin Austin Abbey depicting medieval scenes.

The scenes were like covers for pulp paperback novels. One was for a book called Merlin. In the scene, Merlin, a tall, towering man in a red-orange gown) stood with his arms oopen wide at his sides on a mountaintop before a blue sky with thick, brilliant, white clouds.

Another scene was for a book entitled Sir Gawain and XXXXX (possibly Ywain, but possibly not). This scene was like a spotlight on a dark forest.