night of 12/30/09

i am standing at the front of the room. fiddling with something or writing on the chalkboard. delaying because what i have done is not enough. or not good. this is the final. i am last. everyone else has gone. it is a performance or a poem. i don't think i ever start.

night of 11/01/09

sometimes this is a movie that i am in, or am watching, and sometimes it is real. i am stuck in a south american country. on leaving the airport after arrival, the people i am with are saying that it is worrying having my passport taken. we see someone taking pictures with a polaroid and my they say i should have my picture taken to prove that i was here. i beg him to take my pictuer and finally he relents. it turns out that he has already taken on where i am in the corner, and i am given both. as i examine the pictures, i am worried that not enough detail appears for the location to be identifiable.
almost immediately i try to find my way back home, accosting anyone who appears to speak english (mostly other white travelers) to ask them how they are getting home. it turns out that their passports were taken too, but most of them are offered them back the night before leaving. i am on a shuttle at the airport where everyone else has their passport. i must remain on the shuttle when they get off to board the plane, and sneak back into the airport without appearing suspicious.
back in the terminal, i see out the giant windows that the wind is coming up, making it hard for the planes to depart. a pack of twenty or so of the small planes are all trying to take off at once. each plane needs to bounce its wheels off of a runway a couple of times in little hops in order to achieve lift. the pack of planes takes turns doing so, the successful ones veering up and off to allow for others, but the effort is desperate; one plane veers off into a building. the plane i had wanted to board isn't going to make it, and releases a giant inflated structure, like a multi-story moon bounce, into the air. the passengers are strapped to it. two young women fall out of it together. a zoom of the camera shows their faces, and they are scared, but don't appear to be assured of death. we see that they are strapped to a separate couch-like inflatable, and they land safely. the larger structure lands as well, but is sliding into the water, as the passengers desparately try to remove the complicated straps and belts. the ones toward the water are being dunked repeatedly; some are not going to survive.
back in the airport i am begging an airline worker for a way out of the country. she mentions a bus to a southwestern american town. she asks if i have money. i have a lot; i say i have 'some.' she says that's good, i can pay a 'gas tax,' by which she means a bribe, to the right official, and be on the bus. this is wonderful news. (she is played by an actress i recognize from independent films.)
she recommends i be careful about my possessions. as i empty out my pockets, she is horrified. among other things for which i would be arrested, there is a highly subversive libertarian book. i say i don't know why i have these things, but in fact i have them because i have been told they would be useful in getting away from the country, possibly by someone underground. i manage to throw the things away.
as we have been speaking, four men in kilts have filed in to the large hall and have now dropped to their knees, in a line, before a group of people. this is worrying, as the scottish of this country are a minority with a nationalist movement, and some are terrorists. as i back away they lift their shirts, and they have bombs strapped to them.
i run desperately around a corner, dive into another, and cover my head. i hear someone just getting out of an elevator to my left. there is a massive blast, and shattered glass falls over me. soon there is a group of the survivors in a circle together. several of us ask: 'why are our mouths so dry?' i have a bottle with a little water in it. i take a tiny sip and then pass it on, saying: 'take a tiny sip, and pass it on, and pass these words on.' as i walk away, i hear the next person begin to repeat this.

night of 10/31/09

someone has been taking my poems and making them into popular songs, without permission or royalty, and this angers me. i am trying to collect all of my poems, which are slim hardcover books that keep spilling out of my hands. some fall through a doorway with a deep darkness inside, like an elevator shaft. i fly through and manage to catch the poem-books but can't ascend again to the lit doorway, and am sinking, unable to fly back up. janine is in the doorway, and i beg her, desperately: "help me!"

night of 10/18/09

visiting, some party in a warren of elegant rooms. i prepare a surprise; i am planning to manifest a lavish and opulent dinner table, running the length of a long dining hall. i duck my head into a passageway and yell out for a color. orange, i hear. good, i tell janine, for halloween. i concentrate. the dining room is orange, all right, and somewhat rich, but set up like a cafeteria, with varying food stations and the little runners for plastic trays. i realize that there is a cafeteria next door; the influence must have bled over. i concentrate again. now a kingly table appears.

night of 10/16/09

janine and i make a living for a hundred years in a giant metal tube stood on end.

night of 10/14/09

messy hotel room
sex?
glass wall. like buffalo.
someone cleans up the whole half of the room behind me in a moment
forgot i had to check out today; 2-day conference is over
go back in and

night of 10/11/09

i join up with the superhero theater at the local community center. several of the previous cast have moved on and they are looking for replacements. rehearsal is held in a big audition hall with many balconies. ropes and pulleys festoon the walls and ceiling so that we may fly between them. we have extravagant costumes with capes and masks. i attend for some time, and then i quit. there is consternation that i am abandoning the cast. later i return to the registration, through which one passes on the way to each meeting. i am signed up for both the superhero theater and a writing workshop. i cannot attend both. i am counseled by someone that at least with the superhero theater, i will please children and then can get something out of that, possibly from their parents. the advice seems excessively selfish. i return to the theater. as i appear in the hall, i am received positively but with some hesitation. i fly over to the balcony where the cast has gathered. i do this unaided by the ropes; our super powers are now real.

night of 09/27/09

i am in a group of people whom i know but among whom feel i do not belong, as we are slightly antagonistic. we are sitting in a darkened movie theater and they begin to complain because i keep changing the channel and volume with the remote, fiddling around. i and one of the others to whom i am a little bit closer leave, and jump out--we had been in an airplane. we have various supernatural abilities, and we can fall from any height with no detriment. we land on my mother's back yard, beside a large pond. there is a duck in the pond. the person i am with confesses that he is tired of his previous existence. he takes out a pill and swallows it. we had all had access to these pills, of which there are four possible effects. this one changes you into an animal, irrevocably. some other inanimate object, possible a stufed animal, also takes one of those pills. so now there are two more ducks on the pond. i explain this to the others when they arrive. later, my mother arrives at the pond, which is simultaneously in the back corner of the yard and the back corner of the basement, and the ducks have gone. we theorize that there is a fan vent they could have gotten out through. [note: the pond is not where it was in real life, as in an old photo I saw recently of me and my brother as kids standing in front of our backyard pond. the basement corner is where my father would sit and watch TV.]
my father lives next door; i have visited recently. i am walking around the front of my mother's house in an ill-fitting suit; i keep pulling at the shirt sleeves to get them to fit properly, although they remain hanging out too far. coming around the side of the house i see my father through the window of his house. he is dressed in a suit that fits him impeccably and is talking on the phone using a headset. [note: much like the headset i use for work; he never used one.] i hurry around the corner to the back so that he won't notice me. he has, though, and as i reach the back door is suddenly coming up the walk behind me. i go in, and my mother is there, noticing my father coming in. she bumps into me trying to walk into the dining room, trying to avoid my father.

night of 09/17/09

I am among the survivors in a zombie outbreak. They don't stumble around mumbling for brains; rather they are ordinary people who have become infected with malevolence; they are mostly hidden and only glimpsed. We had been employed in a group of buildings in a wide open area, as if we were counselors at a summer camp, except that our job was something technocratic; earlier in the dream we had been working in front of a massive glass wall to the outside as it was assailed by giant storms. We can fly, though with some effort and difficulty in maneuvering. The buildings are not safe, so we attempt to escape by working our way up laboriously through the tree branches and telephone wires along a road (which closely resembles the road in front of my childhood home) but find that we are actually within a giant room, with the only exit other than the buildings a small door near the celing into the next chamber, which is guarded by the infected. I need to return to a couple of the buildings for some belongings. We observe a group of the infected gathering in excitement. My wife is among them. She gives birth. The child presumably is infected. The group converges gleefully to consume the placenta.

night of 09/14/09

I am a policeman with my partner in a subway car on the way to the scene of an alarm. An ambulance is weaving between and around the subway cars, and in one attempt to pass slams into a wall. My partner and I think this is funny. Later we are running through a subway tunnel--but it is very well lit and clean, like an underground mall without shops, with no tracks or trains--when an officer screeches to a halt in his car and radios for permission to pick us up. ("Permission to pick up ____ and ____"...) Later the three of us are on foot again and scouting in opposite directions. Foreboding; pressure of air. We turn a corner and see a distant torrent thrashing in the tunnel, rushing toward us. We run the other way. We meet the officer running the other direction--there is water that way too.

night of 09/09/09

I am at college. The dream is very extensive and there are snatches of episodes with cars, navigating the campus, talking with various students and faculty, and so on. I meet an advisor regularly at a table at Sam's Club. I find that A-- Ho--  a good friend from elementary school, does as well. Someone is cutting some embedded object out of the middle of a door with a flat chainsaw-like tool; he need only cut two sides, as two were cut previously as I had witnessed.

I have failed to notice that classes started already on Tuesday; it is Wednesday or Thursday. Around lunchtime I am sitting at a table with A-- Ho-- trying to find my class schedule among all the stuff in my backpack. I am emptying out various compartments, which are filled with papers, notepads, wires.

Earlier in the dream I have met with my biology teacher (who resembles a poetry teacher of mine, who is quite a good poet) to discuss how I will progress in the course. I may either take a test or do a project. (There is some resemblance of the test choices to the O-levels and A-levels discussed in the 7-Up series of documentaries we had been watching; the smart (and/or privileged) kid had taken a lot. Also, in my Master's at Buffalo, I had such a choice. I ended up merely taking the [PhD-qualifying] test instead of doing a proper Master's project, as my intended idea got no support from my advisor and I quickly gave it up.) I suggest that I do a project (which seems the more honest, or serious, or legitimate route) and am quickly urged to take the test instead; I tell someone about this later.

I discover that my biology class started at 1 pm. I look at my watch and it is 1:07. In a panic I start furiously cramming my things back into the backpack, shouting and cursing in frustration. It takes quite some time. When I am finished I look at my watch and it is past 5. I am dumbfounded. Alex Hoffman is sitting there and I ask how this could have happened and he doesn't know. (It is strange that in this single case I don't accept the dream logic.) I stagger backward with my hand to my head and ask aloud if I am insane. Finally I recover somewhat, cram everything into the backpack, and rush off to find the biology teacher.

She meets me walking through a great hall full of students. I am chagrinned because it will now seem like a lie that I was on my way to see her. I beg for a moment to explain. I say of the Tuesday class that I overslept, and then beg to be taken seriously as I prepare to explain the events of the afternoon.

However I am interrupted. She explains that I rely too much on improvisation in my work, and I am overwhelmed with the sense that this simply will not do, that I am simply unable to meet the basic requirements of the field. (Apparently I have been to class, or done a homework assignment, at least once.) She gives the example of my explanation of osmosis, portrayed by frogs suspended in sacs that are migrating along a river. (The image is vivid. Apparently osmosis has something to do with the frogs gradually darkening in a spreading blotch and then transferring this condition to other frogs.) I don't understand her explanation of the true phenomenon. (I am awakened by the cat.)

9/17: The most memorable (because it is unusual) part of the dream is where I didn't accept the dream-logic of accelerated time and feared myself insane. The dream is also unlike my usual college dream of having to take the final exam after having already forgotten to attend the whole of the course.

a

I am scanning all the pages of a book. In B&W the scan is fast enough that I might as well just stand in front of the scanner and wait for each page. I wait for the sound of the imager returning to its original position--which is louder than the scan sound and distinctive--to open the lid and orient the next page. I notice after a while that I know just when to open the lid, anticipating the sound. As soon as I notice this I try to see how close I can get and am not as close. I realize that it's because I am thinking about it, and wasn't thinking about it before, since the idea hadn't occured to me. Then I try not to think about it to see if my accuracy improves. Trying to to think about it is hard. Eventually I succeed a few times but not always. I notice that my accuracy is improving anyway. Is this expertise? Are these the stages of acquiring expertise? Is the final stage dialectic, in that it incorporates the opposites of unconscious and conscious mastery? Can I answer these questions better by trying not to think about them? (Certainly I write better when I achieve the state of half-attention, dark glass. But then there's editing. This has not yet been done. Is there a cycle, an asymptotic spiral toward the center?) Well, there's more scanning to do. I wonder where I will pick it up. Of course the scanning process is not indivisible. There are the physical motions that I am perfecting, and are becoming more unconscious (i.e. the primitive actions are becoming complex; I decide to 'scan the next page', not 'pick up book, then check if page needs to be turned', etc. This frees me up to think about things like my accuracy of prediciton of the sound. And there's the point at which I want to sit down and record my thoughts. Then scanning stops. That keeps happening. Thankfully I have decided to let the physical world save my state of progress; I always know from looking at the scanner and the book what to do next. I have to do this a lot; I am scrupulous about keeping my keys and all other going-out pocket contents in a box by the door. If I had to actually remember--at the time I'm walking out the door--what to bring, I'd be lost. I put objects on the floor in the doorway exiting the room I'm in if I'm going to need to take it somewhere else. Then I trip over it. My continuity of self depends on my tripping myself up. So I get up every sentence or two to scan another page. Was scanning what I was going to do today? Ah well. That's never what I'm actually doing. Can be tiring. Calendars only go so far. This is the lesson. It's very tactile how a page sits right at the edge of the glass. Soon it no longer tactile but still felt; a posture, a proprioception. Soon it's just a sensory event of knowing, an arrival in an emitter's field, like a halt at a wall or a shop door's bell. Synesthetes must know naturally what it's like to discover the essence of a thing. 555 words exactly; stop a hundred short! The beast approaches. Wow.