#1
I was on a school field trip in Rome. We had been divided up in groups of 4 to give presentations on...something. It was Tuesday & my group was scheduled to present on Thursday morning. Somehow I missed the part where we divided up tasks & in my absence I'd been assigned to sing an Ella Fitzgerald song (not sure which one, but it was fast tempo with lots of scatting) in front of a big audience. Unfortunately for me I only knew a handful of the words. But fortunately there was a library nearby where my prof. had put much of the relevant media on reserve. I went to the library which was packed with kids from my class all listening to things on headphones. I found the Ella Fitzgerald track on LP which was a big relief 'cause all the other kids were hogging up the CD players. I saw a record player on the other side of the library & started walking towards it. When I got about 10 feet away this heavy metal guy swooped in and put a metallica record on & started jamming out to it. I sat patiently to the side waiting for him to be done. But then I realized that he wasn't doing an assignment he was just listening to music for fun. I explained my situation to him & asked if I could use the record player for 20 minutes, just to copy down the lyrics & then I'd be done. He said "no problem". (WOKE UP DUE TO A BAD CASE OF NIGHT SWEATS)

#2
I'm standing in front of a huge crowd of people & I the music starts & I am suppose to sing some Ella Fitzgerald song that I don't know the words to because I woke up right when that nice kid was gonna let me use the record player. I realize I am dreaming & then Julia Child is there & she is giving me a hug. I am smoking a cigarette on a roof deck looking over the charles river at night, it feels like spring.

Banished Thoughts Resurface in Dreams

On behalf of the other members of this blog: uh-oh.

I had hired a young band of wily detectives to investigate a break-in at my house. We gathered up all the house members & sat around telling them about the numerous times the house had been broken into and what was stolen. This took close to 3 hours. At some point it turned into a party. The detectives kept getting up to get each other beers from the 'fridge & someone sparked a joint. I got really frustrated by this & snapped at someone.
Then it was Thanksgiving & I was coming out of the polling station in Berkeley (don't know what I was voting for...hopefully an Native American president) & I ran into an ex-boyfriend & an ex-housemate both named Scott. I found this very amusing. They were not amused. I invited them both back to my house for thanksgiving dinner.
At the house a full party/wake was in swing. Everyone was in black & some extended relatives were crying. I had this scrawny excuse for a turkey (free=range of course!) which I popped in the oven. I got self conscious about the front yard which need to be raked. I went out front to find my hired band of detectives sitting on couches drinking beers & started picking up after them which kinda ticked me off. My friend Elliot showed up & I told him there was beer inside. A lot of time passed I raked the yard & then had a couple cold ones with the detectives. Forgot about the turkey. Remembered the turkey and went running inside to pull it almost burnt to a crisp out of the oven. Wanted to make some stuffing but could not find a pan. Got pissed and left. It started raining. I saw this display outside a store that had this huge ostrich like birds perched inside it. One kinda attacked me but then let me scratch its neck.

I was trying to parallel park but kept ending up near red curbs.

From Charles Lamb's The Sanity of True Genius:
"...the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it."

From Tim Peterson:

"Stuffing books into my satchel. No one really said it was okay to take them, but I figure just a few…several large bags later, I'm loaded down and ready to depart.

Look at Emma – she's rich but she lives in that miniscule stand-up shack hardly big enough for a closet, and sleeps on that pallet made out of crates. We are watching this as if at a slide lecture. She seems to just live there and tend her farm, but one night all the lights go on and we see her crying in her real house, which is a mansion. She's crying in the stairwell, screaming at someone on the phone.

My cousin is moving in with some friends downtown. It sounds like a burgeoning romance from how she tells it. Downtown Boston is nightmarish, full of very tall brick skyscrapers – everything also very new and shiny. She is moving in with Frank Bidart and his family. Everyone knows that Frank Bidart isn't the real revolutionary – Robert Bly is, because he’s the one with Mexican blood, in fact he looks somewhat like Cheech Marin and is trying to reassemble the Vietnam poets despite the fact that Denise Levertov is dead this time. But no one's listening to him. Frank Bidart is the one who takes the stage and wags his finger at us talking about "Bush's doublespeak" – I imagine he must look sexy when he does that. My cousin likes him I think it's not clear whether they are romantically involved or whether she is just moving in. We walk by the spot downtown, and she points it out – a tall, teetering sliver of a red brick building so narrow it looks like it will fall over, like it was an add-on stuck into the posh neighborhood as a kind of afterthought. There will be an explosion at the rally, we all know and fear this.

Emma is there, at the rally, the same spunky blonde, who has now dyed her hair black and is speaking with a southern accent she didn't have before. The accent allows her a new way to be the phallus, and she shows it off with gusto. She has also started smoking and all the girls think she's soooo sexy. Several of her "followers" tell me this as we wait for her to come down. The room is very crowded and somehow it's very apparent that treachery will strike and a bomb will go off within seconds, set by Mexican Robert Bly.

I want to surprise B. and show him what I look like in drag, but I don't want him to be attracted to me, but I want to show him I look good in drag. So I ask him to wait downstairs for about ten minutes. He is in an irritated mood. I get up to my room and realize I haven’t shaved my legs. There is really no hope for this idea, and it turns out he got tired of waiting anyway and drove away, the hotel clerk tells me later. In the morning, I go out to window-shop at all the junk shops and $1 dollar stores in the area. There are rusty bedframes, odd springs and gadgets, whole aisles full of used nails and screws and L-brackets, plastic buckets, goggles, those cheap picnic tables with the sun umbrella that you stick in the hole in the middle, curvy straws, wigs, old lawnmowers, a veritable bazaar of used and useless stuff. I wonder why I didn't just come and buy everything when I was first moving in here. I guess I didn't have the patience.

As I'm getting into the elevator with Frank Bidart, it becomes clear that someone is going to assassinate him.

I am talking with an old man who looks like Joe Robinson, but he's not Joe Robinson, he's really just an old man. He has these guys working on his house (he's related to blonde Emma, but I can’t make out whether he's her father or her husband). He lost his house in the fire, he tells me, and would like to rebuild it, but doesn’t know if he can trust the guys he hired. Asks me to follow them while he spends days in the library reading Popular Mechanics and xeroxing articles from it. One day I come by the house and look around. They are clearly incompetent. They have begun at the top of the wall and are moving down toward the bottom. So far, they have built a kind of brick trim several layers thick around the top edge of where the wall will be. The clustered sections do not meet. Held in place by wire, they float there, teetering individually. Now and then a brick falls and goes thunk into the ground. I am not sure how I found this out, but the men are ex-cons. I go back to tell Emma this, and since I have been doing such a good job there, she says I can look around at the bookshelves and let her know if I see anything I like. Scene ends with me going through stacks and stacks of bookshelves, taking this book, this book, this book, putting them into a bag. Some of them aren’t even books I want – they’re just on a good press, like the one called "The Limp Dolphin" whose cover looks like "The Changing Light at Sandover" and is by an author I’ve never heard of before, but I figure what the heck good references. I am taking too many books and it is quite clear I will not be able to drag these home. For some reason K. has appeared and is helping me choose them: "You might…like this one over here…Tim." She is wearing all black as usual, and I assume she has been working with me at Emma's house or is it bookstore? Anyway, I don't want to take the really expensive books because I want Emma to stay in business, so I put back the ones I have selected that are in sealed plastic bags. I am still afraid I won’t be able to move with these huge bags. I have taken too many books, and need to run away with them before Emma returns and notices the empty shelves…

My mother killed herself (Hemingway style). Virtually all of my friends were completely cold and unsympathetic, and my father was in denial. At the end my girlfriend and I had a fight and then she became much more sympathetic.

My inability to get along with my father and stepmother is compromising my ability to fight the aliens.

I am arguing with my stepmother that piling phonebooks in front of the doors is futile because the aliens have the ability to walk through the walls. Now is not the time to be crafting beadwork coverings for the furniture.

When two aliens enter the house, I am unable to find any items which will function as weapons, so I have to strangle them. The aliens are green and their skin is sticky like dough. Their eyes are empty sockets. I wonder why it is that the aliens are considered to be so dangerous when their necks snap so easily. However, I know that when two more aliens return to the house, they will be armed with needleguns so I decide to take my chances outside.

Outside, attack planes which look like Transformers are screeching through the skies, looking for aliens. I begin to get nervous as I realize that I'm unable to run due to my wounded leg. I begin searching for structures in which to take refuge, but I can't find any.

Boy am I sick of these anxiety dreams...

From L.K. :

"I dreamt last night that Mark Lamoureux was homeless and begging for change in Harvard Square. I made a special bundle for him with a poem wrapped on the outside and a snack on the inside, but I don't think it was what he wanted."

I am alarmed that the Holderlin translation I have seems to differ from B's. She says "You have to pinch your arm when you are reading it so you can approximate what the poet was feeling when he wrote it."

We are somewhere with a group of people who are donning white clothes for an expedition into the woods behind the house I grew up in. The idea is that if everyone wears white, people can be spotted easily. I decide that I need to buy supplies for the expedition, so I find myself in K-mart.

I am waiting in the checkout line, attempting to buy a metal heart-shaped box containing a bunch of topological maps. The cashier decides that I have been stealing things, so she demands to make a search of my bag. I grudgingly agree and she begins to take the items out of my bag one by one. She removes a condom and says,

"What's this?"

"It's a condom," I say, "do you need a demonstration?"

The cashier is flustered by this and begins to put the items back in my bag one by one, including the metal heart-shaped box. I leave without paying for it.

I return to the people in white who are about to enter the woods. I'm slightly apologetic for the fact that I am wearing a grey cable-knit sweater and not white.

"You are a thief so you keep to the shadows," one of them answers.

We enter the woods and eventually come across what somebody calls the "graveyard of kites," scores of kites hang from the trees like spanish moss. This is where all of the kites go when they snap their strings, I think to myself.

We proceed further into the woods and reach what appears to be a conventional graveyard. I notice a headstone which bears the name "John Ashcroft." The words "Mars Falls in 2025" are written in blood on the headstone.

In an area where there are some benches, my father and my maternal grandfather are having some kind of argument. I'm confused as to what the dispute is about.

Internet dream: Bookslut confesses she has a crush on me, but the picture she sends me is of Jessamyn West. I am too confused to address the discrepancy before waking up.

Also: I met Alice James and was pleasantly surprised to find out that her son is Richard D. James. Funny how things work out.

I've paid a visit to my old eye doctor, who my family no longer sees due to a variety of small personal fallings-out, because I fear something is horribly wrong with my vision (that is, everything is really blurry) and I'm looking for both familiarity and anonymity. Most of my time is spent waiting to see him, or waiting for the results. Finally right before I wake up he says he knows what's wrong. And then I wake up.

Best line from the dream: Dr. Helfman says "And what makes you so sure opthamalogy is the solution to your problems?"

For some reason I'm in the Navy. Am on board a small frigate or something of some kind, which docks at some kind of floating base. The base itself looks like some kind of locker room and pitches violently with the rocking of the sea.

Those of us who disembark here are to wait until another ship comes to pick us up. One of the other soldiers on the base tells me that this could be "For enlisted men, anytime between 10 and 20 years." I try to explain to him that I am not, in fact, an enlisted man but have been drafted.

In the interior of the base I meet a female officer who, by way of greeting, puts her tongue in my ear.

There is also some kind of indoor pool. Suddenly, I am seized by some kind of illness whereby tiny red worms begin to emerge squiggling from my pores. Obviously this puts me in a state of extreme distress. I run to the bathroom to vomit, but the base is pitching so violently that the toilet has become completely vertical and I cannot reach it. At about this point I wake up.

In some kind of gondola above a city with my high school crush. The city itself is more like one of those fabricated city streets you find in an amusement park. In fact, the entire city seems to be an amusment park of sorts.

She explains that the city is falling apart from the edges toward the middle and I can see the buildings and things in ruins near the horizon. Nobody seems to want to address the question of what will happen when it gets to the part of the city that we are presently in.

Then the dream metamorphosizes into one of those "I'm back in high school because my high school degree was determined to be invalid" dreams.

Sitting around with someone debating the rumors that Henry Gould is dead. Neither of us really know him, nor do we have particularly strong feelings about him, but we wonder.

Earlier in the century, I'm in Egypt? researching some ancient find. There is another team of investigators competing with me. Lots of stone tablets, the most important and powerful one of which has a post-it over the text which says "burns eyes when read." I struggle with the temptation to read it. There are hordes of natives and lots of chaos. A cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Call of Cthulhu.

I had no wings.

Nobody knows who built the cabin suspended by ropes above the deep chasm. I am reading about it in the newspaper, thinking I would like to see it with my own eyes.

The invisible man is back. At certain moments he is me, and at others someone else. We are involved in some kind of conspiracy which involves blowing up the boiler room of my high school, which in this instance is some kind of giant flea-market, and escape on some kind of yacht.

I am in some kind of book group with kids from my high school. The big kids haven't done the reading. I am eating my cereal. I decide that the bowl I am using is much too small, so I look in some kind of cupboard and discover a bowl which, to my delight, is much larger.

Suddenly thick black smoke and ash begins to spurt out of a chimney which I can see outside the window of the book group. The building shakes a little bit. I know that the invisible man has done his appointed task. The big kids look excited because they are going to get out of school. Suddenly the invisible man reappears beside me, grey hat first (looks kind of like B.L.'s hat) and then his face which is covered in blue paint.

"To the boat, mon vieux," he says...

In the second part of the dream, Marilyn Monroe is on trial. For what I don't know, but I suspect it has something to do with Martha Stewart. Marilyn emerges from the courthouse looking tired and old, but still somehow beautiful. I want her autograph. We all want something from her. I try to get her to sign a piece of paper. But she wants to charge me $85 for it! I'm so disappointed.

I'm in a new city or town with Mike Skinner. Dusk is approaching. I'm hungry. He says "Grab something to eat/
Maccy D's or KFC?" I say "What about something a bit less corporate and disgusting?" He says "Only one choice in the city." The dream then goes on to other things, but I can't remember what they are.