A DREAM LOG
From the dreamery of Kenneth Tindall
Dream, night of 17 March l993
In Washington D.C. in an old part of the city I am living primitively in a loft and attic complex, have few belongings and sleep on the floor. It reminds me of places in New York in 1968,70-74. It is a bohemian quarter, perhaps a Georgetown of artists. There is a man who shows me sights and functions as my companion. He is youngish and pleasant, knowledgeable, possibly homosexual but very likely not. I see old Washington D.C. buildings including a Christopher Wren-type church. There are other people, artists, who smile and are amiable. In the evening just before retiring my guide serves a supper for him and me. It is a huge silvery salmon, at least a meter long. A big fish. He takes a knife and I think he is going to cut the usual thin slices, but he digs in and cuts thick fragrant filets of the salmon and dishes them up on my plate. It is delicious. Meanwhile my real companion in the dream is a young Chinese woman who also looks after my sexual needs.
Dream night of 28-29 May l993
I was interested in a room in a former industrial building in the waterfront area of Wellington, New Zealand. The room was long-disused and unpleasantly stale, but I stayed the night there anyway, and considered taking the room on a more permanent basis for the possibilities of writing there. How I got to Wellington, New Zealand, was very direct and uncomplicated; it was a matter of a short train ride from the Copenhagen main station. This room did not have any windows onto the waterfront, but rather onto another part of the building's interior, a former industrial hall of some kind. But someone, a young woman, called my attention to a window on the landward side which could be opened. I succeeded in opening the window and now I had a view of the city of Wellington, which was distinguished by Christopher Wren-type churches. The sky was overcast, but all at once it cleared up, the clouds parted and suddenly there was a spectacular vista of the New Zealand Alps with snow-clad mountain peaks and breathtaking waterfalls. I realized that the room was exposed and unsafe on account of an unstable youth element, possibly drug-users. So I left the room and began exploring Wellington, New Zealand, a city I had never before visited. At one point I went inside a large fashionable restaurant, followed a woman up the stairs to one of the dining rooms until she looked back at me and said reproachfully, "Are you really going to go that far?" as though I were bent on discovering her secrets. My exploration of this city, which had a very English but definitely Scandinavian flavor, took me to the railroad station, which was large and busy. There I went to the men's room, where a fear of AIDS appeared to prevail among the custodian and his staff, all of them New Zealand Cockney types. The dream was repleat with human types in close-up, extraordinarily detailed urban scenes, and women having the pleasant sexual aggressiveness of Scandinavian women. I woke up and made a round of the house at 0430 hours, had a glass of white wine and went back to bed and slept. The dream resumed, and this time I got in with the Jews in Wellington, New Zealand, which was kind of hilarious. Woke up at 0610 hrs,
d. 22. juli 1993
I går nat i søvnen -- i forbindelse med en drøm -- kom jeg i tanke om et berømt digt hvis l. linie kunne referere til et meteornedslag (der var et faktisk meteornedslag over Kattegat en nat eller to siden). Jeg vågnede, steg ud af sengen og gik ind i stuen, og ledte efter digtet i en bog som rummer vedkommende digters samlede værker. Straks vågnede vores store dreng Erik (5 år) og kom ind i den oplyst stue, og i sin søvnighed så på Far bladre i den bog -- en hyggelige hverdags epiphany. Digtet følger:
(translation)
Last night in my sleep -- in connection with a dream -- I happened to think of a famous poem whose 1st line could refer to a meteor fall (there was an actual meteor fall over the Kattegat a night or two ago). I woke up, got out of bed and went into the living room, and looked for the poem in a volume of that poet's complete works. Immediately our big boy Erik (5 years) woke up and came into the lighted living room, and in his sleepiness saw Father leafing in that book -- a cozy everyday epiphany. The poem follows:
SONG
Goe, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake roote,
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Divels foot,
Teach me to heare Mermaides singing,
Or to keep off envies stinging,
And finde
What winde
Serves to advance an honest mind.
If thou beest borne to strange sights,
Things invisible to see
Ride ten thousand daies and nights,
Till age snow white haires on thee,
Thou, when thou retorn'st wilt tell mee
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And sweare
No where
Lives a woman true, and faire.
If thou findst one, let mee know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet doe not, I would not goe,
Though at next doore wee might meet,
Though shee were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet shee
Will bee
False, ere I come, to two, or three.
--John Donne
Lynæs, 7 November 1993
I will describe a chain of phenomena in mind, dream and nature. Last Friday the 29th of October I went into Hundested to do the weekly shopping. After visiting the library I bought a cold Elephant beer and biked out to the end of the jetty, something I do to enjoy the fine autumn evenings. That evening -- it was about 1615 hours -- it was still and overcast, the sea calm yet with a slow heavy swell like molten metal. The light was unusual, and as I stood out there on the rocks of the breakwater it became more and more remarkable. It was as if I were standing in a marine painting by Vilhelm Hammershøi. The colors were from Hammershøi's palette exclusively, and I realized that this particular light phenomenon was something he strove and strove again to capture. The water was gray-green and so was the sky, and out on the Kattegat you couldn't distinguish the horizon. It was growing dark and boats were heading into the harbor, their wakes finely-drawn and luminescent white. The partly submerged rocks below were a glistening black with luminescent green seaweed, some of them with clusters of open mussels whose interiors were bright and detailed. The land on the other side of the fjord became more and more indistinguishable in the deepening twilight while directly overhead, through the gray cloud cover, was a faint opalescent rosy glow from the set sun. The sea and harbor smells were very distinct, and to landward the buildings of the town were all as though painted with this extraordinary combination of hues. The night following this experience I had a very strong dream, more real than reality, of my father and Seth. In this dream Dad said he was very glad that I had returned to Denmark (in 1974) to be with Seth, who committed suicide in 1982. This dream was a joyous renunion with Dad and Seth. It was so real that in the dream the three of us realized that we would have to separate and ignore each other if people weren't to think that Dad and Seth had never died after all, or that they had indeed come back to life. The day following this dream, Saturday the 30th of October. Birgit and Erik went to Copenhagen to do some shopping. In the afternoon Birgit as agreed phoned from the city and said they would be with the next train home. At 1625 hours I set off with little Thomas in the stroller the half mile to meet Birgit and Erik at the train. They had bought a soup tureen as a birthday present for Birgit's mother, and it was heavy and Birgit was glad to put it under the stroller. It was a clear autumn afternoon-turning-evening, the sky still bright, and there was a snap of frost in the air, and I think it was Thomas who caught sight of the moon coming up over the trees on the horizon. We were walking home on the other side of the road because the boys wanted to see some geese belonging to a house there, and the four of us dawdled because we enjoy each other's company and because the new evening was so spectacular, and it was dark by the time we got home. The moon which rose over the distant woods and the nearby plowed field was as clear and golden dewey as a big cold glass of Chablis, and the air was heady with the smell of leaves and the moist earth and wood fires. Dad was part Indian, and there was something Indian or Eskimo about this great moon ascending, like it was something the Indians had long before there was television to look at. But more specifically, it was as if in the frosty mist beginning to rise off the fields you could see the spirits of game animals and hunting animals, herds of deer, hares and foxes, like "the boarhound and the boar" in one of T.S. Eliot's lines, running in the eternal happy hunting ground. It was tremendous, a cosmic sight. It reminded me of the night in New Hampshire in 1970 when I walked out and saw Bennett's Comet. It filled half the sky and I was sure it was my father and mother. It's like love is the constant, the cosmic fact which abolishes all dualities, and if you find love you are together, now and for eternity, with all the people you have ever loved. During that walk home from the train last Saturday I realized for the first time that now I really do have my own family.
Dream 0200 hrs., Monday, night of 17 January 1993
"The highland laddie's ring"
In a rocky landscape in the British Isles, something like the crags of the border country between England and Scotland. The mist is low-lying, but now and then a male figure can be seen emerging up from it into the sunshine in a joyous leap. It turns out that the young fellows (myself?), who are ardent rustic swains, insert a big toe in a ring-shaped silver outcropping in the rock, and with a kind of ballet step push off vertically. These guys, in both their role and costume, could be James in the ballet "Le Sylphide." The natural silver ring formation is a metallic encrustation in the gneiss of the crag. The rings can be extracted from the rock with a rock hammer, or a hammer and chisel. They are esteemed by the girls, both as a token of affection, or infatuation, and because they are proof against sorcery and black magic. There is a cult associated with these rings, with legends, and special shops where specimens of them and items such as clothes with silver embroidered patterns referring to the rings can be bought. The lettering on the shop windows is silver in art nouveau style.
Somehow this is an important dream, about a way of making a decisive effort. A lovely and happy dream, also about succeeding in love.
Dream ca. 0230 hrs. Friday, 4 February 1994
A remarkable dream in monochrome. On a dry plateau, almost a badlands in western Iowa (!) are found traces of an ancient Indian culture, naturally reminiscent of the mound builders of North America, but also of far more remote Indian cultures. These are huge drawings on nearly level sheets of exposed rock, drawings whose scale and possible theme are similar to the huge patterns of straight lines thought to be Indian remains in the dry coastal highlands of Peru. These cultural remains in Iowa have long been known but little frequented, as "something" has discouraged tourists and investigators from visiting the area. In the dream a party of the curious venture to penetrate into this geography. The drawings seem to represent a fantasy image of boxcars, although they are not drawn on the same level as on railroad tracks, but sort of helter skelter at different times and on the most suitable expanses. Above one of these boxcars is written in a kind of primitive alphabet the name "Kekulé," (Kekulé von Streidonitz was the chemist who, in a dream, discovered the benzene molecule.)
Obviously this dream has to do with cargo cult. But it is also the second dream I have had in as many nights referring to the Los Angeles earthquake.
(From here follow dreams from the decade of the 1960s)
Dreams night of Friday, 12 February 1960
In Warsaw, the Inspector has told the locomotive engineer that if he really loves his engine and really wants to get the feel of it he should ride up in the open front. The engineer replies that he would rather stay back in the cab and read gauges and speedometers (feeling of guilt, half-truth, repression).
The locomotive is a large one, dynamic, powerful, but driven curiously by one enormous piston which oscillates inside the boiler casing. The Inspector operates it gingerly.
Smoking marijuana in a skyscraper with a bishop, engineer, Tony Cowan, Jane Davis, and an unknown cute girl. I hold Jane Davis tightly by the waist to keep her from tumbling out of the window. She falls anyway, and I too, nearly. Someone else has fallen. Tony? The engineer? The bishop removes his mitre, rends his hair and laments his episcopal incapacity. I am terrified, then relieved, and return to the composed, almost smug, but welcoming cute girl.
England and Ireland, more trains, locomotives; then hunting a black weasel or martin or stoat who marauds the cellars of houses.
Dreams night of Saturday, 13 February 1960
Navy dream. Then raising wreckage of huge old steamship from sea-bottom muck: cleverly, by innumerable tiny winches. Then compressed air. The hull is plugged with concrete. Ship raised, cleaning her up.
In another dream I am treading water. Two other swimmers approach. A small sea-snake swims toward them with its head out of the water (like the ones in the Gulf of Siam). I shout a warning but the pair ignore me. More snakes and more unheeded warnings. The swimmers stop nearby, but seem to be unaware of my existence. One of them points into the water below and slightly behind me and remarks to the other, "Look. There are some farmer's sons." I look and see a tangle of sea-snakes with a couple of large ones swaying perpendicularly with the surge. I feel terror and swim away.
Then I notice a pindsvin (hedgehog) swimming alongside and past me in the same direction. A sea-snake is impaled in the hedgehog's quills - sudden fright, then confidence and even comfort. The pindsvin seems to be leading me somewhere. I follow, but it has vanished. Then, on a terrific swell, I am thrust onto a cornice of a cliff that sheers away into the depths of the sea. Instead of land, the cliff is something gelatinous, greenish, fragrant, voluptuous, like ambergris. I cling but the tide tries to wash me away. I slip down but manage to hang on. Pieces of the cliff fall away; the sea rages but recedes and I am left on the face of the cliff whose now exposed mass is enormous, formidable. I must not fall! I struggle, climbing until I reach the top, weary but exulting. It is a grassy, flowery plateau. The wind blows sweet and the sea is beautiful below and away. Blue and green sounds and smells. Peace. Vastness. Awe. Eternity. Cosmos.
Dreams night of 14 February 1960
Some sort of ball game in the water - water polo or basketball. Feeling of being discriminated against. Me against the world. Old school companions, etc. They toss the ball around among themselves. Only accidentally do I ever get it and score.
Dream of Navy boot camp in San Diego. The brig (mild). The station commander's house and daughter. (Her name was Heather.)
Dream night of 15 February 1960
More or less conscious soul-searching. I break myself piece-by-piece like firewood, and with the intent to ignite. I am awakened by Tove's finger in my navel. Tove outrages me.
Dream night of 18 February 1960
Descent into the depths. I am inside an aluminum sphere, "Bathyscape." Thickness, ribs. A metal sign on the overhead reads something like "This is the safest device modern ingenuity can produce. If it fails, well, that's the way it goes!"
I am apprehensive, helpless. I have brought it on myself. The deep-ening sea's pressure increases implacably. I wake up.
Dream night of 26 February 1960
The coast, mare nostrum. Then some kind of boat train to be repeatedly met. I build a cozy fire in one of the train's compartments. Passage of familiar strangers' faces.
A clock with SORRY written on its face.
Dream night of 21 May 1960
I enter attic room filled with a jumble of familiar furnishings. I am reminded of Derradda and filled with guilt and longing. I pick up a hand mirror and am compelled to look at my reflection. Terror, loathing. I force my hand to move the mirror and my head to turn, but not until having glimpsed my face which, I realize, isn't so bad after all.
A train of locomotives.
Dream, night of 6 August 1961 (Copenhagen)
Mother gave me a peeled hard-boiled egg which I crammed (with difficulty) up my ass as soon as I thought she wasn't looking. Feeling more of necessity than of pleasure. Feeling of lousy success, and, of course, guilt.
Dream night of 15 October 1961
Tony describes the landscape of a country in which he has lived awhile. His words convey me to the scenes which are terrific mountains, ice-capped with more of shadow than of stone. They aren't the very highest mountains but peculiarly awful. They aren't peaks but fairly regular serrations like a dog's back teeth. The sky is varying blue-black like steel which has lost its temper. The mountains become pink and I afraid. The scenery terrifies me, yet it is something I feel I would like to claim.
At the mountains' base is a dark lake. A ledge projects out into it and Tony suggests that we swim from there. He tells me the lake is exceedingly deep; that it goes down to city level.
Dream in November 1961
Deam of a bohemian café called FÆLLES HOBBY. Great dream.
Dream night of 9 January 1962
Given orders by farmer boss (Niels Aabling) to scrape the snow off the edges of the road. I take the tractor. Ice and slush make scraping impossible. Long road. Evening comes, passing through a park; a family with two young children goes casually and happily into the thickets.
Uphill. Terribly steep. I manage a lower gear and proceed. Too steep. Tractor tips over backwards and I jump clear. Go to a roadside house where a young couple are preparing for love. From the upper windows can be seen the top of the hill. The road goes up and over a lip. There are recent tire tracks. Over the lip is a lake in a crater. Abysmal monsters sport in the tubid waters. In the surrounding rocks are caves carefully lined with ancient masonry. Feeling of familiar horror.
Dream night of 13 January 1962
A gigantic organ whose console had two manuals and instead of stops a vast bookcase. I felt embarrassed when someone told me that I had to start the bellows. Rumbling, whooshing. Made a few preparatory runs over the keyboards. Couldn't do anything else. Sloppy, limited and familiar. Then removed a couple of books which showed one-bar examples of melodies from Bach cantatas. Tried playing a few of these, with one hand only. Then a female face scowled out at me from behind the books, saying, "Don't you do anything to those books. They don't belong to you." I had to apologize and assure her that I would be very careful, etc. She reminded me of an agent of my mother's. This dream had a feeling of embarrasment and ineffectualness.
Dream night of 4 February 1962
A very important dream, containing action on genuine moral indignation.
Giving a Christmas reading of Dylan Thomas at a university. Interruptions and flippancy perpetrated by the President himself.I depart amid groans. Bob Nelson tries to take over. Can't. I return later to a hall empty save for him and a couple of consollers. Feeling of enormous sadness. In adjoining room I find piles of his books and papers indicating that the reading was something for which he had prepared very hard (one, a blue pocket book about religious ecstasy called "The Full Force of Love"). I hadn't prepared at all like that yet had been doing very well. Should I have guilt? Felt justified?
Right now (0400 hrs.) I feel perfectly fresh and happy.
Dreams night of Sunday, 24 June 1962
Meeting with Piero Heliczer at his place. He's got the latest model Phillips tape recorder with included record player and all jacks up front. I'm admiring and envious. I ask about a certain circuit if it can be removed and repaired separately. Piero answers Yes, but that it's really not so well-built anyway. Then I notice that the wiring is shoddy, the whole thing having been assembled on a piece of masonite. Its sound is good, however. He says it is a two-track and I am reminded of the scrimpishness of my four-track. I want to borrow some of his records, especially the Bach-Vivaldi double harpsichord concerto. He agrees and we go to my place. I humbly lift the lid of my tape recorder, then get the idea to remove the cover plate to show its insides. And there lies exposed a most beautiful piece of equipment. I'm awed and he is dumbfounded. The engineering is superb and compact. Its sound is more permanently good than his. I triumph.
--------
Meeting with Tove, Thue and somebody like a Tony-Benny combination. We are at Holmens Kanal. The boys dive into the sewage, inviting me. I daren't and am disgusted with them and my own cowardice. I find myself alone with Tove. I haven't fucked with Janne for several days and am randy. I'm afraid of Tove. I know that if I remain with her I'll fuck her and then everything will be ruined. I flee. The canal enters the sea or a river like the Seine. There is a definite Paris feeling here. I can see the sewage in a line which follows the bank. Running along the canal bank I pass a man whose job it is to break up the sewage with a long broom. He's a gleaming Dane, placid at his job, dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt, white trousers and black clogs. He pays no attention to me.
Dream night of Monday 25 June, 1962
Going with Mother/Tove to an opera at the Royal Theater. The house is full of fashionable Swedes. During intermission we stroll along the richer foyers. I see a poster advertizing girls' clothing. It depicts the inside of a theater box. There is a didie-doll lying on its back in a wanton position on the railing, its taffeta skirt is up and I can see all the rubber non-details. Beside the doll, on the right, is a lovely white frock fashioned so that two little girls may be in it at the same time. The girls are exquisite and give the advertizer's impression of being daughters of a rich woman. We proceed. There are stout gentlemen standing at the entrances to their boxes. They are wearing satin Empire breeches. I am worried, embarrassed that the tight pants would make obvious their genitals. Mother/Tove assures me that they are certainly strapped down. The gentlemen are smiling and bowing.
Dream night of Tuesday, 31 July 1962
I'm going to a department store with Seth to buy a pair of Levi's for myself. It is closing time and they won't let any more customers in. I park Seth at the entrace and run around to another building that gives indirect access to the store. This is a kind of entertainment palace like LORRY, with various halls, saloons, foyers for different functions. There are no customers yet, just waiters and major domos in preparation. I sneak upstairs on my way to the store. I happen to look through the window of a door into a very attractive room. Renaissance furnishings, carved beams, fireplace and even appropriately disguised filing cabinets. I know that the whole thing is phony, newly put together for some ulterior purpose, like the Chinaman's whorehouse in "A Cool Million." Nevertheless I'd like very much to live there.
After making sure nobody is watching I go inside and look around. I discover a beautiful chess set in an exquisitely carved case, and steal it by putting it inside my shirt belt (?). I am sure that the chess set is genuine. I find into the department store and proceed to buy my Levi's. I'm concerned when the sales clerk measures my waist that he'll discover the chess set, but he evidentally takes it into account. I pay for the Levi's and leave; then comes a great anxiety and difficulty in recovering Seth. I finally do, however, and everything is all right.
This dream is similar to the one in which I stole an antique recorder.
Dream night of Saturday, 18 August 1962
( lunt = fuse, like on dynamite)
With Janne returning from Trondheim. We get into Oslo Station and crazily walk to meet the arriving train as though we should board it or join the emerging passengers in order to have accomplished the act of returning. Worry about tickets and seat reservations. I go to get both of our rucksacks which have been in the check room all this time.
In the station hall I find a large ship model in a glass case. There is place for three masts but the ship is so large as to seem to warrent four. Only the aftermost is stepped and rigged, as an example, I feel. The hull is wonderful with deckhouses, skylights and companionways. There is a gentleman and his small son looking at it on the other side. The light is poor and I can with difficulty read the name on the bows and counter. It is LUNTEN, in red.
Dream night of Saturday, 8 September 1962
"The Assembly of the Sick"
I'm washing milk cans on the farm. Two gigantic dogs bound over field and fence towards me. I am frightened of them while knowing that they are friendly. One, the black one (the other is white) reaches me and jumps up, as large friendly dogs do, and I duck, but the nails of his forepaw have nicked me on the little finger.
Later, there is a field beside me with wildflowers of wondrous hue: gold, blue, orange, violet, red. They grow in clumps of mixed varieties, as though having been arranged. After a while some young women come to pick the flowers. They're dressed in an exotic but institutional-seeming costume, like pastel Mother Hubbards. I watch them, interested but removed. More come and the ones who have picked move on in, I notice, a particular direction. Soon a crowd has gathered, men and women and children, most of them now in ordinary dress. They begin to move in that direction.
One of my neighbors, whom I recognize as one of the workmen in the factory, nods to another and motions with his hands in the direction. They both move off, hands in pockets, conversing. Most of these people no longer bother with the flowers.
A young girl notices me and approaches me. She resembles Marianne. I see at once that she is sick and realize that all of them are sick. Her arms are full of wildflowers and the wind does things with her dress and her sick-lank hair. She tries to tell me something, to explain it to me, but I move back, knowing myself healthy and fearing contaigion. Some of the others look on, approving her efforts to appeal to me. She wants me to come with them to the place of the sick. I retreat but she persists, clutching at me. I have a forewarning of horror to come and awaken.
I consider this as being one of the most important dreams I have ever had.
Dream night of ca. 15 November 1962
I am watching a movie which reminds me of "The Third Man" as though it dealt with a piece of modern history. A city like Paris or Copenhagen, a young man picks up a girl and they go to her room. The next morning he gets up early to go to work or whatever. All day she is anxious, afraid he won't return to her or that something might happen to him. In the afternoon she sits waiting at the window, looks down and sees him cross the traffic-filled square towards her.
Later they are at a café. Some kind of drama takes place in the high-domed ceiling above them. Two great ice-clouds manoeuver
around each other and suddenly Death pops up on one of the clouds and begins throwing chunks of ice at the other. Close-distance sounds with echoing like rocks falling among high mountain peaks. A piece of ice falls near the couple, almost hitting the girl. The young man leaps up onto the empty cloud and does battle with Death. They throw ice at each other for a while but neither of them wins. Death departs laughing. Afterwards they are walking home. He suddenly stops and tells her to wait, that he'll be back in a minute, and then vanishes into the crowds. She stands there while others walk past and a feeling of loss overwhelms her. She knows she'll never see him again. She turns and notices the shop she is standing before. Its window is full of old paintings in ornate frames. One of the paintings is of a country road in winter, with ice in the ruts of the road. As she looks at it the ice in the road melts completely away.
Night of 10 February 1963
Janne dreamed that Tove told her a remedy for sleeplessness. Spread your toes wide and put uncooked oatmeal in the spaces between. Then pour milk over the whole and walk around with it all day. Should be eaten before retiring. Sleep good then.
Dreams night of 9 March 1963
1. Disestablished life-saving station whose servants want to keep it going anyway. Rugged, nearly actic coast. One day they bring in a large old-fashioned ship's lifeboat. Bystanders watch it being docked. One glimpses half-eaten human remains. In the bow of the boat are several frozen corpses in attitudes of resignation with pipes in their mouths. There is a student, an engineer, etc.
2. I get a thorough briefing on a certain man. His dossier is flashed before me: criminal record of swindling, smuggling, etc. I notice in the upper right-hand corner of one document the Danish word sejlads. His childhood history is presented in cartoons. He and his brothers in aprons are preparing an elaborate meal. Then I see under the table that one of them, our man, has a leg missing.
Then there's the man himself, at this moment of life. He's attempting to paddle the length(!) of the Atlantic in a kayak. He looks disdainfully up at us as we pass. His face reminds of George Whitman and Bob Nelson and Thue Jerlang. He has one nondescript companion. They spy another kayak and paddle over to it. It contains a dead man in a yellow sou'wester. Then we and our man and his companion look up and see something as though it had just appeared. In a clear sky, the mountains of Tierra del Fuego. The wind is rising and it is getting late. We've got to make it to port.
Dream night of 3 April 1963
Janne and I all kinds of sex inside an active volcano.
Janne's dream night of 28 July 1963
"I'm on a small stage like that of a puppet theater. I must wash my hair in glass. The glass is around me in panes, and beside me in heaps of chips and powder. I try to wash my hair in the glass but can't, because I don't know how, and because I feel that it would hurt me to do so. I sit and speculate on the problem, then wake up."
Dream night of 6 January 1964
In a kind of Danish church building, white walls and pillars, high narrow windows of clear glass. Two small human figures keep trying to fly up the wall like large winged insects up a windowpane. One has a sackcloth cloak with AIR painted on it. The other is richly clad and with a golden chain that jangles as it tries to fly. A little girl with Mary Pickford curls is playing with her dog. I feel that the dog is really a man, an actor in a poodle skin. Outside in a field some people and myself are trying to move an old airplane. It is big, yet smaller than life-size. The wing dominates; bulky straight leading edge and flush with the front of the fusilage. I'm reminded of a World War II "flying wing," striped paintwork flaking off, empty windows. We get it turned and a man says to me, "This is really nice. I wonder who shot it down." I try to tell him that it wasn't shot down, but simply abandoned. We lug the wing inside the church. The little girl is running up and down the aisle. I look at the dog to see if it has a man't gait, or a hint of trousers under the fur. No, it's all dog. We heave the wing up and along the choir, to the apse. Some people on the other side throw ropes to us and we try to hang it over the altar. No success. We have a special woman with us and with her proceed in our ceremony. She is extra sensuous. So sensuous, in fact, that she can coax flesh out of nothing. She makes some kind of psychic effort and part of the wing becomes flesh. Then the man, bulky and in a business suit, shows his little finger, whose nail is sharp and highly developed. The flesh of the wing is still dead and he's going to give it life. He jabs rapidly and repeatedly at the dead flesh, the little finger going up and down. I'm afraid the nail will cut into the dead flesh, and feel disgusted. The man is all the while talking about what he is doing. Then life seems to appear. The flesh reddens and stirs. The two little human dragonflies continue to struggle up the wall and fall again, the chain jingling and the sackcloth rustling. The dream changes.
Dreams night of 15 May 1964
I'm on my bike and come to a sort of summer roadhouse restaurant. I go inside and find Robert Kennedy having vulgar fun. I give him condolences on the death of his brother -- he seems not to take it too seriously. We leave and I notice a baby in a buggy. He tells me casually that the child is his. Later I meet Janne in something like a post office, where I receive a lot of surprising but well-earned money from the States. While I am marvelling over it, a uniformed man hands me a large envelope containing a letter and a few copies of a magazine in which is published my poem. The magazine is merely stapled together, but the typography is excellent and there are many illustrations, ads, etc. There is neither table of contents nor index. I search for my poem. I'm sure it's there but I either skip over it or don't recognize it. I show the mag to Robert Kennedy, but he seems unimpressed. Later Janne and I are walking home. We live in a tall modern apartment house. She goes inside but I remain out, watching the sky in which something very strange and important is happening. The clouds are ropy and violent, like smoke which has tensile strength. Their color is a somehow hued and grainy blackness, reminding me of the color-monochrome combination used in filming "Moby Dick." It is frightening yet beautiful. Something in the sky seems to be imminent and I exclaim to someone – perhaps Julie -- "See the monochrome clouds!" They part here and there to reveal patterns in brown and green which I recognize to be the earth as seen from an airplane, yet reversed as in a mirror. The clouds part even more. The earth image is moving slowly and I have the sensation of being about to fall into it. I rush into the house and call Janne. She comes and sees and thinks it is beautiful but unimportant. Then bodies of water move across the earth-sky which I recognize as being Danish: the Sound, the Great Belt, the North Zealand lakes, etc. Tremendous feeling of dread yet irresistible desire. I am imperilled yet yearn.
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I'm at the Fabricius home with Peter, Julie, etc. I have misplaced a valuable dish or something and feel guilty about it. Hr. Fabricius very surprisingly comes and puts his arm around my shoulder and says something kind and consoling. We both look through the window to the garden. Later I take a (ship!) shit. then go and wash my hands in a large bathroom-bedroom. Fru Fabricius is there and tells me that I am welcome to use whatever I wish. I, somewhat embarassed, assure her falsely that I have already washed myself. She's wearing knitted sports clothes of the 1930s, but with a heavy and dark cape or cloak. She invites me to dance. We dance spontaneously and intricately. The dance is wonderful, exhilarating. Then my hand caresses her stomach, and I realize to my utter horror that she is pregnant.
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I consider and hope that this crisis is finished. It's been a milestone. I'd like to thank my dreaming. I do thank and love Janne.
Dream, night of 20 June, 1964
We are going to visit Issa at Sanct Hans Hospital. We arrive in the rain and are made to wait outside. The building resembles one great big brick with windows chiseled into it. We are dripping wet by the time the door is opened. Issa is lying silently in bed. I go over to her, the bed seems warm and very attractive. She smiles to me and I pull the covers down. The bed's odor and warmth overpower me and I desire to join her in her condition. Her body, and especially her armpits, seem delicious. I get into bed with her, and we embrace, completely asexually.
After a while I look out the window and notice a line of monstrous footprints in the soggy grass. The patients in the ward are of all shapes, sizes, sexes, and are all adults wearing pajamas. They seem quiet and happy, and very childlike. I wouldn't mind being one of them. The doctor is tall and white-coated. He has acquired some of the patients' tics and mannerisms. He insists on drinking his tea from a special cup.
Dreams, night of 23 June, 1964
I am walking in a wood on my way to church, where I expect to see Fru Fabricius and her family. I notice Julie moving among the trees nearby, and I try to avoid her. She comes to me eventually. I'm carrying a basket containing a few empty jars. She sees these and says "Du skulle ikke har haft dem med. Vi kan alligevel ikke give dig noget nu" ("You shouldn't have had those along. We can't give you anything right now anyway"). I feel shame for my presumption and some disappointment. We proceed together to church (Roman Catholic Mass).
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I am dining with my father in a restaurant. He comments on a painting of a sailing ship on the wall. I tell him that the painting is no good because it incorrectly represents the way in which the sails are fastened to the yards. I explain to him in great detail and with drawings the proper rigging of sail and yard. (The painting's yards were anachronistic, belonging to ships from before the Age of Exploration.)
Later, I am walking outdoors in a city which resembles Paris. Janne and Julie accompany me. We stop on a streetcorner beside the Seine and I place a large and exquisitely detailed model of a fishing boat down on the pavement. Julie crawls into it with great difficulty, laughing, and rocks back and forth. I feel indignant.
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I am reading a book in French and English about the modern exploration of a certain island near New Zealand. The name of the island is something like Conway's Island. A peculiar large and anachronistic kind of reptile has been discovered living there. The creature is about 2/3 as tall as a man, has a back humped like a camel's, stout and stubby legs, a short neck and a triangular head with a feebly pendulous upper lip which resembles a tapir's. Scenes from the book come to life. The explorers are among some aborigines who are mockingly describing, in their own language, such civilized techniques as radar navigation. Then a boat is trying to land on the island. There is no anchorage anywhere, nor any beach; the explorers are required to leap from the boat up onto the cliffs. It is very dangerous, but they succeed. Then I see a landscape of the island - a greenish twilight, rocks, no trees anywhere. The rocks become a closely nested herd of the reptiles. They move lethargically, silently, and I notice thatthey are licking from one another's back a kind of green fungus, which seems to be their only nourishment. I feel loathing. Then another illustration from the book appears. It is of an aborigine child, a little boy. There is a large oval wound in his chest in which is growing a brightly colored worm or snake.
Dream, night of 24 August 1964
I am watching the construction of the end car of an American-style
streamlined train. Workmen are busy fitting stainless and enameled panelling. I notice that the frame of the car, however, is old, rusted. I seem to recognize the frame as that belonging to one of the trains in my past life. I'm very much preoccupied with the shape of this car, which resembles an upside-down boat, or a fish's tail.
Later, I am with Janne in one of the compartments of the finished car. The train is traveling at high speed. Janne is nude in bed with the sheet and blankets pulled up around her. She admires while I derscribe the comforts of our compartment: the wash basin, the toilet, the closet, the air conditioning, etc. But I notice that the window is extremely small, so that one can only with difficulty see anything outside. This disturbs me. I try to get out. There seems to be an inner passage to another part of the train, but it proves to be a sort of appendix of our own compartment. Finally I do get out and wander through the train. Everywhere there is the most modern luxury. A name plate in the passage tells that the car was constructed in Finland. I marvel at the perfection and the coldness of the whole thing. I see into another compartment and its window is just as tiny as our own. At last I find a window of normal size, but it belongs to one of the extremely expensive compartments, a compartment which resembles more a living room in a house than anything belonging to a train.
Dream, night of 25 August, 1964
I am on my bicycle in the lower streets of a fortified medieval (maybe phony) town. Some young man says something which offends me and I vow to catch him and hit him, so I proceed with my bike up the streets. The going becomes more difficult and I'm forced to get off and walk. I soon loose interest in trying to follow my enemy. The street narrows to a cobbled path and seems to lead spirally upwards inside a large building. My cat is with me. It's a black cat with blue eyes which reminds me of Maeve (my cat in Ireland). I push my bike up the steep passage. Approaching the top and the open air, I hear some children practicing the piano inside the house. I lean my bike on the wall and enter a door, trying to find the children. I find myself in a large broom closet, containing brooms, buckets, scrub brushes, etc., and the piano practicing seems nearer but just as difficult to find. I give up and return to my bike in the passage. Then I notice that my cat is missing. I go to the door again and call "Seth. Seth. Here, Seth."(!) My cat is gone and won't come back to me. I feel great loss, yet am happy at the thought of continuing my climb up into the light and air.
Dreams, night of 2 March, 1965
I'm the fireman or something, not the engineer, of a long freight train, which slowly rolls onto the wrong track. The train must stop and back over the switch. I climb down ashamed and change the switch.
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I am given the assignment of laying track on a roadbed which had been prepared by someone else. In fact track had been laid there before and ripped up at some earlier time. The track and all its components are lying in pieces around me. I very carefully assemble it over the rusty markings of my predecessor's work. I am successful, until I come to a place where a switch is to be laid. I have all the parts at hand but can't seem to make any of them fit.
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I'm a wayfarer stopping at some sort of school. It isn't a real school, only something like a very progressive version of the Danish højskole. The rector is an unpleasant man who shows me generosity only because he has the material and other wherewithal to do so. The buildings are modern, the classrooms lighted from within but I can't see anything through the frosted glass of the windows. The rector makes it plain that quite a lot is going on in there. He shows me a parking lot full of comfortable cars. I somehow want to get inside the school and join the instructive fun. Can't.
Dream, night of 16 April, 1965
Julie comes to visit me at work. The offices at Wilhelm Hansen are being rearranged and I don't really know my place there. She keeps wanting to talk to me and I try to blend her presence into my proper work. She is, after all, musical. But finally, when the others seem to be completely occupied with other things, Julie and I settle down to some good talking and feeling. I notice that she has changed much, her face seems dissipated and haggard, experienced yet uncertain, and slightly sluttish. We enjoy each other's body as though nothing had happened before. At last she asks me (or I ask her) if anything has changed between us since she's gotten pregnant. I, for one, don't answer, but continue to take pleasure in the moment. It's as though I would like to reassure her while knowing that it all was just another transient relationship. I caress her stomach, and it isn't nearly so bad as the time I caressed her mother's pregnant stomach in another dream. In fact, it's rather pleasant and protective. We eat furtively and depart, have to catch a train. We arrive at some station just as our train is pulling out. Another one comes immediately, but doesn't slow or stop so that we can board it. She is pregnant and I must be careful.
Later a train takes us to Finland. We get off at some lake out in the Finnish countryside. The cars are enormous and seem to have been built with confrontation with the elements in mind. A man, of undetermined nationality, is about to swim some hundreds of times the length of the lake, and all the spectators are certain that he is committing suicide in this public and spectacular way. We stand at the edge of the crowd. Finally an enormous Finnish policeman appears. He is wearing a huge pleated many-colored greatcoat with a hood. He removes this, and we all think that he's about to stop the proceedings in the name of humanity, or whatever. But he goes on removing layer after layer of greatcoats, duffel coats, anoraks, until some passing people on motorcycles ask him why he doesn't stop the man from swimming to death. The cop gesticulates angrily with a cigar in a long amber holder, as though to say that it was none of their business, and that it was in his power to stop or start such things but now he was just a spectator like all the others. We are treated to a glimpse of the poor man swimming slowly and deliberately up and down the weedy and tree stump-clogged shore.
I wake up with a feeling of regret but resolution concerning Julie. If there was to have been more between us it would have been on my terms, and she could just go ahead and have the other guy's kid.
Dreams night of 20 September 1966
Terrible night, hard dreams, stomach in a knot. My book ( Great Heads) is terribly written, a travesty of a travesty. Horrible thing. What am I failing, betraying?
Dream of San Diego, The carrier enters port, CVS 36, not quite mine. Tour of ships. Marvellous old-fashioned steamer, teak and brass, young officers in beards and Prince Albert coats lining up for chow, which I smell. Later, up on a hill, I see that the old ship is merely a plaster mock-up for training purposes.
Two men are fishing with nets in filthy water, for fat black catfish wearing sunglasses. Great sport. Sluggish fish. They disembowel them and leave them feebly struggling in the sewage.
Dream, 17 December 1966
Sad, sweet dream while taking a nap. Page from an American book, drawing. A farm beside a vanished river whose bed is being used for something else, maybe a highway. Up in "The American Cultural Center" I am being served something like a school lunch. A teacher-librarian type professional lady is reading from the book – all about this farm in oh-so-beautiful language. The story turns to a description of a meal on the doomed farm and the reader breaks off, protesting her ravenous appetite. But she refuses a school lunch. Rattling on my plate is a hollow half-diamond (glass) containing some condiment.
I am given a book of complicated multicolored forms in which I'm supposed to indicate that I have taught English once at a night school.
Dream, night of 4 July 1967
I am walking in a wood on my way to a town. There is space between the hardwood trees so that rays of sunshine filter down and it seems to be afternoon. As I walk along the path I carefully ransack my old shoulder bag for tubes and boxes of old pills left over from the time when I was in the Navy and right after. I recognize the pills as I go through their containers one by one – and furtively – but none of the pills seem to be the ones I have use for. I throw the others away – with some little regret – and still don't find what I want. Oh, well. I continue on and approach the town which seems to be right on the edge of the forest, or it could be that the town is completely surrounded by the forest.
Dreams, night of 20 September 1967
I get on an American train like the California Zephyr which is to cross the country from San Francisco. Janne is not along and I'm very sorry. The landscape with all the old familiar scenes passes by and I miss her terribly. Lone Wilhelm Hansen is also on the train and she keeps giving me extra work to do. The food is terrible and the waiters dispute among themselves. On the train are Muzak tapes with the same ghastly music as ten years ago.
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I try to cross Kongens Have (in Copenhagen) from a new angle and run into the backs of some roomy but tumbledown villas. I skirt the back yards and am discovered just as I'm about to reach the street. Am invited inside. The children are being put in bed. I share the food. They are old Danish Jewish families. I feel welcome but hemmed in. Still looking for Janne.
These two dreams sort of run together. At one point the whole thing reached an awful but logical climax and I was suddenly released, a free man. The sensation woke me up, happy and refreshed at five in the morning, ready to go through the rest of the night.
A dream about Malene Grünwald, October 1967
He saw her (Malene's) face pass, looking out at him from the window of a yellow bus which passed going in his direction. He walked for a while through the center of town, then got on a bus which took him to a part of town where he knew a house where there would be a room waiting for him. He got off the bus, walked a block and entered the house (a New York tenement). The bannister swayed a little when he put his hand on it and the light bulb swung on its wire, sending his shadow ducking and leaping up the wall of the scabbed hall. the door was open and the light on in his room with the shade pulled down. He waited out the night sitting on the dirty yellow chenille bedspread, watching the wall and listening to the faucet drip rust into the washbasin. Once he looked out the window and saw the wall of a building opposite, the stucco falling nearly all away and taking some of the mortar from between the bricks down with it, a single window illuminated with the shade drawn glowing yellow and no silhouettes from inside. He stood for a long while watching the window and the dawn arrive blue behind the building opposite. Then he left the room, leaving the single bare bulb burning, and walked in the early morning through the old neighborhood, the sky falling soot and plaster on him, back into town.
Dream night of 4 November 1967
I am in a port city, somehow small and tropical yet somehow Danish ( Slavekysten?), and walk around and see out of the corner of my eye a piece of ship's hull. I walk on and round a corner and the ship appears again, tied up at a dock beyond a few streets, and the hull is enormous, looming out above the intervening houses. I want to reach the ship but, meanwhile, am distracted by the sound of music. I walk into a shop where people are buying each a half cantaloup. It isn't necessary for me to ask the shopkeeper. He simply picks the very melon that I've always wanted and wraps it in a piece of Saran Wrap. I have also acquired a small plastic bottle with wine in it.
The music is still playing and I find my way to it without difficulty. It is a large concert band of dedicated amateurs, playing corny concert arrangements of familiar pops and Latin American numbers. They are all Danes, yet I search the faces of the musicians, trying to recognize members of the school band and orchestra from back in the States. Nobody I know. One of the saxophones casually abandons his instrument and starts happily playing a pair of maracas. The whole thing seems very well-rehearsed, and everybody seems to be enjoying it even though it is about five in the morning and this is not an actual performance but merely a last dress rehearsal. There is also an audience in the room, eating and talking like in a cafeteria. A girl is sitting beside me and I recognize her as Helene from the old folk club. She is finishing her meal of fish and chips and asks me if I would like something to eat. I reply No thanks. I have my melon and little bottle of wine, though there's not much wine left. She is very amiable and radiating warmth and even sexual interest. Her body touches mine.
Then Ann appears and smiles with old-time familiarity as though wanting to pick up where we had left off before. But her husband Peter is around, too, and I really don't feel like going on with Ann.
But Ann persists. Helene and I rise and she asks me if we can't find someplace to make love. She is very delightful and it seems almost necessary that we make love. I explain that Ann is on my tail and so is her husband and that we must shake them off. We do, somehow, and in a back room proceed to undress and fondle each other. This is very pleasant and promising - until I realize that I had masturbated earlier in the day and probably wouldn't be able to go through with intercourse with Helene.
Dream night of 17 May 1968 (54 E.3rd St.,New York)
We arrive at a seaside town, Tony, somebody else, and I, and set about trying to make our way. We have something to sell and want something to borrow, practical things like the use of a sewing machine. For this give-and-take endeavor we endeavor to ingratiate ourselves, which seems wrong as it turns it into a take-and-take thing to our benefit exclusively. And it doesn't work. For example: there are scattered households of hip people living in the town and we contact them, couples, meeting up at ungodly morning hours while he's still sleeping and she's begun the sweeping, in order to offer something or ask for something. Finally, not getting anything out of it and still bowed by an incredible burden of love, I split. The town has in some way just acquired a new kind of electricity, and its inhabitants are throwing out their old radios, all of them with fanciful old-fashioned cabinets, some fashioned to resemble a fishing boat with a lampshade, all of them in some way nautical. The streets are crooked and narrow and the townspeople busy and happy. I wend my way to the waterfront and the morning sun is shining warm and promising on the sea, a calm sea with a gentle swell, blue and yellow, clear to the sandy bottom with shoals of weed strung out here and there. This is it and I feel great.
Dream night of 30 May 1968 (54 E.3rd St., New York)
A real whopper of a dream. Dreamed I gratuitously hit a policeman over the head in the exercize of his duty. He had just apprehended a wanted criminal and I helped the cop by inviting him into the car, and then leveled him with a stick. I didn't know either of them!
Anyway, this dream leads to other, soul-wracking dreams about Seth, and I realize my guilt and burden of responsibility. And now it seems silly to have gotten up and written it down. Or rather written about it. These dreams have truly shaken me. It was indeed because of Seth that I left Tove. Is it too late to be sorry? I can make it yet. It has always seemed more important to put words on paper than to father my children. Maybe that is why I haven't been able to really write. The two must go together. Have to.
Dream night of 24 October 1968 (2OO Riverside Drive, New York)
An investigation of the nature and progress of the Youth Movement. It's still in effect, but seems stalled because of an inability to fit two mattresses under the same sheet. This was a beautiful dream in deep sleep, and I would have found a solution except that something woke me up. Great regret, but it must be for the best. There must be something else. Another answer. Horror at lying there thinking that "2001" is the alternative, at least the sterile manliness of it. But I think I know the direction it is going to take.
Then a dream about beating the cat to death. More from the beginning of the film. We all know what that's about and it is ghastly. (What a fop way to put it.) The black cat.
Somewhere there was another dream about trains and Østerport Station in Copenhagen – referring back to a dream a long time ago. Bellevue? 3rd Street? This is a crossroads, but on a political level, or so it seems. There was again snow in the dream. But it is also on a woman level. Remember: the ship is to the left. To the right are more tracks. In the middle is the exit to the city.
Dreams night of 13 February 1969 (Frimestervej, Copenhagen)
Guy like me treads into a room shambled with bottles, glasses and napkins, crusts, remnants of a party. There are two beautiful girls there, girls he knows, and they start talking reminiscent nonsense. Then it gets little by little more serious until, as on a signal, the girls lock the door and a tremendous anxiety fills the man. There's nothing he can do. He begins to die and inexorably swells up and explodes with anguish similar to an enormous speed rush. I wake up and turn over, unfold my shoulder which has been creased under the weight of myself and Trolle. Very painful, arm asleep. Get up and shake it out with a glass of water and a piss.
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More dreams. Somebody being chased away from some hovel where he had thought to find shelter. More and more degrading, raggeding, grapefruit rinds and coffee grounds, garbage-can rumble and frozen dirt path around the house. The guy collapses cut and bruised on the overturned containers. Sharp rims.
Speaking of rims, in another dream from this series there is a frozen and deserted lakeside resort where there ought at least to be happy skaters. Somebody is playing a hose around the place waiting for the grass to grow. But it is very cold and some queer singer croons and sputters with a hand mike to an amphitheater of empty chairs.
Illuminated visions of heraldic animals.
Dreams night of 17 February 1969
Along the way with somebody, was it Art or Trolle? We meet an old woman and her dog. Remarkable animal, the dog. A large, wingless variety of bat, almost. Shorthaired dogskin and terrier legs, head distinguished by bat ears and some kind of batflaps on the throat, nose a little sharper than the usual batpug. About the size of a highboy bulldog, and after having been startled by its appearance we immediately recogned it for what it was and took it as a matter of course. Had an interesting chat with its owner. As for the landscape, it was like a Southern California tract with a pathed and gullied backfence. Then a dream of railroading and dire intimations of a railroader's hot-coals fate. Didn't see why this should have to be, nor do I now.
Dream night of 26 February 1969. (Sankt Pauls Gade)
I'm riding in a car together with two other men. It's a new car, and perhaps one of the riders, maybe even the driver, is a young woman. We're barrelling down the road on a fine day and there isn't much other traffic. It's a fine new car of American style, fast and powerful. Along comes another car, similar to ours but significantly different, and occupied by a similar number. I'm riding in the back seat and, on a calculated signal, allow the accident to happen. It does, to our advantage. Maybe somebody is killed, but in any case there is a terrible amount of damage, especially to the other car. We have triumphed and the other car is shambled. This seems to mark me for life with some kind of committment.
Dreams night of 27 February 1969
Guy in Nazi concentration camp presumably in Denmark. There is a border closeby or something to cross. Or then it becomes that he wants to escape and blend inconspicuously into the surrounding hinterland, become one of the locals. And so for this purpose he decides to conceal himself in one of the Volvo trucks used by the camp. He does and it works. He is out and in the arms of his beloved. But then he is caught again and brought back to the camp. In a Volvo truck again. It was during mealtime that the decisive event occurred. A meal of buttered toast. A little mouse who had helped the lovers was caught, too, and put to death by the German authorities. And something is done to the sister of one of them who was also involved in helping with the escape.
But then he finds himself in the concentration camp again, shamed and full of grief yet planning to get out again. He has several chances to do so if only he'd use the same measures as before. But he is afraid, or it's just that his heart isn't in it. He can't make himself do it although it would be possible, or at least worth the effort.
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Dream of working on a farm which turns out to be the place on Fyn "Petersminde," working for the same guy forpagteren. He's big and violent and I am in possession of some secret or knowledge that is dangerous to him. He is overbearing and ugly-tempered exactly like an old-time ogre, and all I have is a certain nimbleness and this knowledge, to mention a few, which is of a cosmic nature. And so is the danger, impending catastrophe. I read a page in a newspaper and see a picture of a sea captain who is wearing a cap which looks like the whistle one mustn't blow on pain of death. Here goes. It turns into a chase of subterfuges, up and down stairs and all around the farm, hair-raising escapades, the forpagter holding up a fresh pelt like a pall. (I remember the great thunderstorm during the harvest on Fyn. Fire and dog-trembling. The laughing girls while the neighbor's thatched roof burned.) So it reaches a pitch of climax and my love comes to me. Tove or Julia. Smoke and sulphur in the air, conflagration behind us as we go into the garden where flowers are still blooming on their stalks in the shadow of the smoke. Two farm cats approach us, the cat and her kitten, to give us messages, tell us something which they do sweetly with their noses.
Dreams night of 1 May 1969 (Liflandsgade)
Falling asleep, dreams suddenly take a nutty turn. I am reviewing the things that make me what I am and realize that I am inside my head looking at a wall covered with band aids stuck here and there, and for a moment am afraid that I can't get outside my head. This phenomenon has occurred before, earlier today in Guldbergsgade, and several months ago in Baltimore. Then it was after having applied for a seaman's document (at the U.S. Coast Guard office), some drug-using types were sitting on a door stoop at the bus stop (Federal Hill) and one of them was playing the flute softly. Standing waiting for the bus I got the sensation of being trapped inside my head.
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Dream in the early morning. Old-time Baltimore oratory to piano accompaniment, tedious but with a lilying charm. The speech includes the proposal to put something in their railroad museum. Something is enacted into law and the politicians swear on a ceremonial twenty-dollar bill in the form of a light bulb with the bill pasted on it. Trains, modern and Pullman Standard.
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Dream of sailing in rough weather, windy sunny day, perils, comparison with taking off in a free balloon with champagne and music, Awake and compare this with the dagens fugl transmission on the radio, and then what about the clamorous sendoff of the captured condor in Peru.
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Dream of drinking wine in a waterfront bar. The wine is wonderful and is poured from a chipped and weathered old bottle. I ask the barman if the wine has been fetched up from some sunken wreck, but he doesn't reply, seems offended at my asking or put off in some way. There's something more yachtsman than seamanlike about this bar.
Connected with this is a sequence where another guy and I are swimming out after boats in a small harbor in rough weather. Similar to the storm that time on Shaver Lake where what's-his-name and I hauled in the boats and he showed me the Trojan crawl, great surge out of the water. In this dream, however, the guy tells me about finding some corpses of young West-Indian women floating in the water. I see one of them. She is dressed only in a tight skirt like a bridal or burial garment, and embroidered on it is something like "Nothing hurts like a rock n' roll band."
Night of 2 May 1969.
Awakened in the middle of dreaming by hearing the birds outside. One of them was talking about voting rights in the woods of Southern Sweden.
17th or 18th May 1969
Been dreaming a lot recently but not able to remember much of them. They come back suddenly and fleetingly. Here's some of one, dreamt night before last:
Going with somebody or alone to visit some people in a house that I had visited in dreams years before. It's upstairs through a long corridor cluttered with belongings, short stairs and slanting attic walls, turn right and knock on a door and somebody answers, opens.
Come to think of it, I met somebody today who seemed to have come from that dream place.
In the dream this time, the house was tall, hollow and tottering, and there appeared to be the danger of flooding. Sunshiny day but raining heavily like certain days at sea.
Dreams night of 20 May 1969
Dreams last night very striking and strong again. In one of them, I am writing in a situation as in Fredericiagade, when Peter Skelly gives me some marijuana. I accept it but don't know what to do with it. Having taken it somehow violates the inviolable toolpouch. Must watch out for this.
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In another dream I am traveling slowly and leisurely with Jim and Sara Cowan. We come to Fresno just at the time when the fruit is ready for harvest, even though it is springtime. There are monstrous pomegranates hanging from the trees, and apples, Fruit big as hornets' or wasps' nests, with the skin peeling off to show the seeds inside hanging together like some organism separate from but within the fruit. The skins are gray and the seeds hard. This must be the seed crop. It looks terrible. We come to a house where Tony is living in misery, alone, the place a mess. He seems glad to see me and I am wary. I come across letters to me written but never sent, in the messy envelopes that he and I took such pains in making. One of them has a cutout of two old-fashioned soldiers leaning on each other in comradeship. One of them is dressed like a Kentucky rifleman and the other like a redcoat. I explore. The neighborhood reminds me of the old one where we used to live, my family, when I was a kid, on Balch. But now the area is a slum, paint peeling from the woodwork of the houses, alley fences rotting, trees gone, wretchedness. Oh yes, I skipped the part where a man offers me good fruit to eat. He is like Dr. Lyon. I stray into his garden and he gives me sweet apples and pomegranates, saying of the latter that they have snap to them. The fruit is delicious and I want more, go looking for it with Jim and Sara but we can't find any. The man comes to us and offers to show us where we can get more, but Jim and Sara seem to be afraid of him and put him off, I think. Most of the fruit we come across is inedible; the crop must have been frost-blasted. Back to the exploration of the old neighborhood. I go from yard to yard and everything becomes more desolate. I come to a house with a big semi parked outside. The house is as dilapidated as the others but the truck in good shape, imposing. There seems to be danger here, but I am eager, bold and curious. I go into the house, but something calls me back and I leave. On the way back I find that what has called me is a lovely pregnant girl.
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In a dream I am with some old friends from the old days, somebody like Bernhard and his wife before they split up. Everything's cozy and we're enjoying things. I look through the record collection, or part of it, and come across an old Bob Dylan record corresponding to Sgt. Pepper. The album is double and on the inside cover are a lot of photographs. I'm appalled. Some of them are of Janne and maybe me. The surprising thing is the old-time quality of the pictures, from just two years ago, another style, another way of life. Much more innocent, I think. The unaffected colors, casual sex. Lovey-dovey Pilegaarden couples. Also, I get the idea that Bob Dylan is into the Detroit thing so deep he can't get out. There were some really hearty meals in those days, too.
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In another dream I am going to Frank Bierlich's place to pick up my mail. I see Frank on the street and watch how a girl greets him from across the street like in the old days. This time he's a little afraid to respond, instead of being haughty as of yore. I ask if there's any mail for me and he says yes. We go into a courtyard where he lives. His dwelling is on the first floor of a house that is being torn down around his head. We go inside and it's as though the shambles outside didn't exist at all. There are others inside, Jens, Klaus maybe, and we play records. It's a big old-fashioned turntablæ with space for three records simultaneously.
21 May 1969
Went to sleep for a few hours and woke up with dreams of hideous speed events going off like lightbulbs dropped down an airshaft. The flag staff and the moe hole, Texas medicine and railroad gin. Somebody must have stepped on Eisenhower's grave.
22 May 1969
Dreams of extremely strong and seductive country girl. She's got everything and really puts the clamps on.
26 May 1969
Woke up, went out to take a piss, and some queer dream succubus scuttled off the back stairs, Made me discharge into toenail-clipping thin air. Probably didn't like what he picked up on, relayed it to cohorts in other centers.
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Dreams of traveling to the Arctic Circle in an old steamship.
Dreams night of 8 June 1969
I am staying or having something to do with Lone Kelstrup's basement storefront, which turns out to be much larger than supposed. There's something about going there after a storm when everybody else is afraid. Somebody I know is selling newspapers along with other goods, machinery, I think. Gil Sorrentino is working down there, or at least he can be contacted, or something having to do with my book is there and I seek it out. I go in and some people ask me what I want and I tell them I've got to see Grove Press. They are uncomprehending even though they are connected with it. Then they comprehend and motion where I should go. I come across a big scrapbook full of documents attesting to the granting of automobile license numbers and plates. Most of them seem to be replicas in paper of actual license plates, and slightly reduced. Some of them are very old license numbers from the early days of motoring. The paper used for these documents is of a special kind, corresponding to the paper used for printing money, and there is a peculiar smell to it, like the smell of school and office closets where they keep the big bottles of ink, etc. The lettering is often peculiarly fancy. I notice especially a couple of purple-colored license documents. One of them is from Illinois and the number is A 1. I have to verify this incredible fact with several looks. Another is for a Missouri license plate and it has two photographs on it, something like police mug shots or government ID cards. The full-face shot is of Pope John, and the profile is of my Dad.
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Before this was a dream about the Princeton in a terrific storm. Something about the catapults, the flight deck rising out of the water like a speedboat, or a hydroplane.
11 June 1969
Dreams last night of Chris Flanders and Kirsten Løppenthin, an old boat, traveling with Janne. We got to Chartres after negociating with French soldiers, and German youth in old German military uniforms, coats and capes. The cathedral had been turned into a multi-level ladies' hairdresser's.
15 July 1969
I'm staying with one chick but should be, or have been, staying with, another. My things are at one place and life goes on pretty nicely. She has a child and I seem to fit in well. Her former husband or the father of the child remarks that if it goes on like this the women won't have any use for the men. I ignore the remark until one day when the chick's girlfriend comes over and the one I am staying with wants me to clear my things out. There's something about having been occupied with gathering sticks and stones along a path out in back. One of the sticks is really a stone, flint, and I wonder whether I ought to chop it over with my ax. Meanwhile, the girl I would much rather be staying with I haven't contacted for quite some time, and I don't know whether I would be welcome or not. I'm in a terrible fix and don't know what to do, but poutingly remove my things from off her table as she sits or stands on one side of the room and the girl- friend on the other, close to me, arms folded, one leg crossed over her knee, swinging her foot up and down.
A dream full of tribulations, about freeloading and coasterbraking. In it, I could be several persons I know: Douglas, American Frank, a couple of Brians, Peter Skelly, your unemployed pimp in general. Danny pestering Julia over the phone, his presence that first night at the loft, then Frank Kuipers's capping acid all night.
19 July 1969
Daytime dreams of Julia and I doing things together, sleeping together. Sometimes she resembles somebody else. Dorrit Wivel is in this too. At one point I get into the car with her and we drive through a rainstorm. The street seems to be flowing away, particularly the lines down the middle of it. I point this out, and Julia says "It's just water."
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At another point later in these dreams I'm in a housing project apartment house basement where they have recreational activities, something like the basement at Ivy Hill in Newark. A storm is blowing but there are children playing in a playground sheltered by a half-high fence, or prefab concrete wall. There seem to be more play leaders than children, and they are dubious bearded and anoraked and corduroy-jacketed types. Seth is there and he and I look each other in the eye. Finally he asks me something that reminds me of Tony's manner. I ask him if he remembers Tony. He replies yes, and asks me how Tony is. I say that I saw Tony and that he used to ask me questions like, "Say, Tindall, what were you doing out in California?" Then Seth somehow vanishes. I go look for him among the play leaders who are sitting on a central rail in the middle of the playground, something like the central island in the Colosseum in Rome. They appear disturbed, try to put me off with glances and whispering among themselves. The storm blows. The girls around make it okay and I get going.
23 July 1969
Dreams: (just woke up again at 11:30) A church outside Copenhagen. The Pastor is getting ready for a service. A beautiful girl walks by me and says "Det er mit hus!" (That's my house!) "Nemlig" (Namely), I say, and look after her. She is a free, lovely, natural girl and I'd like very much to eat her pussy.
I go inside the church. I have somehow lost a big flat old book in there and look around for it. But I find the place such that I forget about the book. The place is crowded with young people enjoying themselves and the church. The Pastor is trying to conduct a service, and indeed there is something going on down around the altar. My girl is supposed to sing with the choir, I think. There are the most wonderful things going on among the participants-congregation. Little conversation, much subtle music, people sitting or moving about in perfect understanding. No drugs and no incense, I see my girl a couple of times and she smiles to me, but sometimes it's like she is smiling to everybody else too. The organist is having a ball playing "The Rakes of Harrow" on the mediocre organ. No, it's "The Irish Washerwoman." The Pastor is jealous, everybody knows. There are comments comparing them: "I always thought the organist was supposed to be the middle-aged one." His fingers make a clicking sound on the keys. The music accellerates and the listeners cheer him on, but without actually cheering or shouting. The Pastor or priest intrudes, or sends one of his representatives in the form of an ugly homosexual. Everybody is still enjoying the music after it has stopped and this creep comes up and does something. His presence is repulsive, but that's what he is for. Imp of Hades. Nobody pays him much attention and more things go on and another, worser, queer makes himself known. This action takes place upstairs in the church, the gallery-organ loft, which is constructed of carved wood. I make my way downstairs in order to look for the book. On the way down I look at the ornamentation. Some are icons carved out of something like walrus ivory. I am tempted to touch one of them but it seems both inappropriate and dangerous. There is the danger of contagion. Some have some little relation to the Christian religion. Half way down I notice that the ramp leading to the pulpit is in the form of a ship. I do a double take, but the ship isn't really a ship but only a fake, and only half a ship, the forward half of a vessel that, except for the bow, resembles a Viking long ship. The bow is like an old packet or East Indiaman. The pulpit itself rises amidships, and its characteristics are vague and out of place. The whole thing is made of oiled beech. I see my girl again, and some other girls, and they communicate a "see you later." There are a couple more queers to be negociated on the way out. I look around the vestibule for my book. There are others, but not the one I am looking for. (This reminds me of rummaging in the abandoned house yesterday.) There is something about a preacher coming and preaching. He's supposed to be competition for the Pastor but is really an accomplice, actually. And queer too, and in some kind of voodoo getup. The organist reminds me of the conductor of the Fresno Municipal Band at the time I was in the Navy. Mr. Holmblad? Some of the other men remind me of certain boy scout leaders and teachers. Good men and true. Not at all undertaker types. Mr. Langstaff is in there too, somewhere. The Pastor himself is a stereotype, only theoretically identifiable. He has a number somewhere, or a diploma.
I had arrived in the town outside Copenhagen by a hair-raising bus ride in which I realized that I was hanging on to a bannister fixed alongside the bus. And off we went, the centrifugal force terrific and just about tearing me off. I was afraid of being hit by a passing car, but it didn't happen. So I arrive and go into something like a library and get the book. It is a thin, flat, hard-bound volume of folio size, and I misplace it going into the church. There is also an old bicycle that can barely be ridden which I have acquired. (The bicycle is like Hundertwasser's at La Picaudiere.) There is only an accidental hand brake on the left handlebar, and the rear tire, which is almost flat, binds on the rear fork when treading the pedals backwards. Now that I leave the church I find the bicycle again and ride off on it. There's something about perfectly good bike stands going to waste in the streets and plazas.
Soon I'm on the road heading for Paris. A car stops and picks me up and we drive away. The driver is a French personable young slender Allan Jensen type, wearing a light blue shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He can't manage the car so I have to do half the driving; he shifts gears and works the pedals while I steer. We approach Paris from what seems to be the north but is actually more like the Porte St. Cloud. We drive up the Avenue Foch and he asks me where he should let me off, and I tell him the offices of the Paris Review. "Drive down the Champs Elyseés," I tell him. We get to the rotary around the Arc du Triomphe and it seems like a war has been going on for a long time. There are bunkers around, ruined buildings, rusty ironwork, weeds growing in the pavement. A boy is walking parallel to the car and he ducks into a gate. When he comes out again, at a little distance and having passed through the building or ruin, I see that it is Seth, and he gives me a signal saying "Everything under control." We get to the Champs Elyseés and I realize that the Paris Review has moved its quarters. I want to try the old place anyway, but can't remember the name of the street, only the location, a few blocks down. But we don't actually reach it. There are long blocks of wreck, wrack and desolation.
In a suburb of Paris, near a park or beside the river upstream from the city, I am with some other people including Julia Yesner, sometimes a composite of her and other women: Janne, Anne Andersen, Kirsten, Vibeke, Trolle. We are under seige and homosexuals keep turning up and acting threatening. They get bigger and uglier. Finally it gets serious. One of them has a brass staff in his hand which I have to take away from him. But he's not really all that determined about it. I think I beat him over the head with it. Then there's a fat queer who approaches with a big tin bucket or cookie can slung by a belt over his shoulder. He is carrying an old-fashioned spyglass, telescoped into itself, as a kind of weapon or badge of office. The spyglass has some kind of white wrapping around the barrel. I manage to get it out of his hand. But he has four more of them in the bucket and he tries to get them out. But I have taken two of them and thrown them into the stony underbrush. The others I take out of the bucket and beat him with them. He is wearing an air raid warden helmet and I break the spyglass over it and over his throat, shoulders. He's big and determined, but ineffectual. Julia has been off to one side, demure but not frightened, and very determined.
In this last part of the dream the scenery included abandoned military, industrial or railroad buildings in the offing. There's the old Gare Montparnasse.
24 July 1969
Dreams of Wisberg as The Castrator Foreman. Workers are given a plastic laminated ID card or instruction card, which accompanies their having been (intentionally) castrated by a machine or simply the system. There is a little blood like a child loosing a tooth. The card has a cotton tartan pattern as background. The practice originated with the English weaving industries.
31 July 1969
Dreams of Carolyn and I going through elegant formalities while underhandedly engaging in something petty. Some of this takes place in the "Hotel Tropicana" which resembles Hotel Østerport in Copenhagen. I see Poul Borum outside. He does a little pirouette in his speed kind of monkey suit. Later he transmogs into Pegasus the Flying Horse. There is a calendar on the wall with a picture of a spot in Ireland where I had been in an earlier dream. The name brings to mind a Danish place name, while being very dissimilar, which resembles the name Carmarthenshire, I think, in Wales. Carolyn and I are being telephoned by Our Mother, who says we don't love her. We're popping flashbulbs too.
11 August 1969
Just woke from dreams. Staying in a house where tenuous families move in and out, some returning from summer vacation, some having stayed. There is a feast meal in the kitchen. The feast itself has never been held but the food is there and for me, for my consumption and enjoyment. But the providing of it is limited by the (wisdom) caution of the other members of the party. I get into some awful good eatin anyway. In particular, there is a bottle of Dago Red that everybody else appreciates but leaves me only about a quarter or fifth of the bottle to drink on the sly.
There are parts of this dream that remind me of an old dream about finding a model railroad under a permanent market shed in the middle of some city like Paris or old New York, while together with a girl, Janne or Julia.
In another part of the dream I come across a manor house something like the De Young Museum in San Francisco. There has been and still is a conflict of innuendoes between Stewarts and Tudors, mocking each other's architecture, pointing out details such as uniformity or room size, presence or abscence of fortification, etc. This reminds me of another dream, of boating as in an old Dutch painting and going into a big old stone boathouse.
(Now the room smells like the loft and our apartment on East 3rd Street.)
There are swans and ornamental reptiles in an enclosure of the gar-den, fountain playing. There is a sharp division of the state of the grass running right through the middle of the enclosure, as though two different gardeners had been taking care of it. It's the border between The Soviet Union and the rest of it. On the other side the grass is infected with weeds and fungi of disuse. I want to cross over this boundary but somehow am kept from doing it. Somebody else's prudence, I think. Just as I am about to make a real try the caretaker comes up and acts threatening. He's the caretaker for both parts of the garden, and my glance slides off him as though he, especially his shoulders, were made from old garden marble. He wants to know what I am doing there, unspokenly. I tell him outright that I come from another manor house, in Ireland, and go my way. I descend some steps leading to a kind of atrium, and say to the lounging young guard there that I am a product of Henry VIII, which he accepts without making a move. I proceed through different gardens and architectures. The Tudors, with a mixture of contempt and awe, refer to the Stewarts as "Saxons."
In another part of the dream I am witness to a battle something like World War I trench warfare. The action is slow and sluggish. A real mess.
Then there is a huge old sailing ferry between Denmark and Sweden, named the Queen somebody. Just like nowadays but maybe three hundred years ago. The rig is a transition from the Galley days. The passengers are drinking guests, most of them under awnings stretched over the deck, some of them insisting on placing their colorful mugs on top of the awning, which is almost too high for them to reach. The serving wenches and crew try to limit their number, until only a few are left. There is a parallel between this and the rest of the dream in which the officers of each army are guilty of "mocking the enemy." The British officers carouse in a mud-stained vehicle and their hats, like the old mugs, are supposed to mock the German army, not necessarily the German officers. Then we see a spick-and-span blue Prussian railroad car roll around a corner and down the line. The officers are clean and for the most part sober. Their hats, too, are placed on top of the car and they and their colors are a mockery of the British army.
A dream, 21 September 1969
I go in there with this bag and walk around among the tables. There are a lot of people, they are younger than me, apparently, and I make my way through the place and I pass a certain table, and there is a girl sitting there whom I used to know before, a sort of cross between Richie St. John's and Bob Dylan's Ebba in Copenhagen and Peter's wife, the Peter who brought back some meeschaum pipes from Jugoslavia, his nice freckle-faced redheaded wife. But she, this girl, grabs my elbow and says, "Oh Ken, aren't you going to play?" or "When are you going to play again?" And I am just about to open the bag and show her the pile of money inside when I get a signal from a guy sitting at the table – I don't know him but he just gives me the signal, like "Don't open it and show her." So I just sort of change the subject and say, "Oh, you mean where's my flute. My flute's over there." And I motion out toward the coatroom where, in my mind, there is a flash of the briefcase I got from Julia in New York, as though I have a flute in it. But then I go out of the place, which I have come to by bicycle. and look for my parked bike. This is in a small town like Visalia or Fresno, I guess. Anyway, I take the bus back to the station. In the bus I am sitting on the back seat with this bag on the seat between my thighs. Somehow I miss the stop and the bus drives on and I don't know where it is going to stop, and I panic. So I stand up and get off the bus, and I realize that I have left my shoes someplace, like back in the folk club. And even worse, I have left the bag full of money in the bus, and it's like I am standing on a path in a place like Brønshøj in Copenhagen or one of the Paris suburbs. Actually, it is a sidewalk covered with soft, warm asphalt, and it smells like old California hot days when they tore up the roads in Fresno. But I panic and run after the bus and wave my arms and yell, "Stop the bus! Stop the bus!" But it drives on, and there I am and don't know where I am going, and no shoes, no money, among strangers, and it's "The Bitter End."
Dreams night of Wednesday, 23 September 1969 (Århus)
Sailing with the Gullfoss a piece up the coast and back again, and then up again a little farther. Most interesting was the change of the steward's staff, cooks and waiters and scullery people, cabin attendants and all. The change from a Danish crew to an Icelandic crew, it happened in the middle of the night. Of course it wasn't really the Gullfoss, it was a dream ship. We were calling at different places and steering around, like sailing in a miniature golf course. And there was riding in a helicopter, which I think belonged to the ship, the Gullfoss. We were riding in the helicopter and drinking very good whiskey, ostentatiously but inconspicuously and getting a little tipsy up there, and there was always danger. I asked the pilot, who happened to be a woman, if we couldn't fly just above the treetops of a sodden, Autumn, New York state forest. And she complied with a lift of the eyebrow.
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Later on in the night the dreams changed character, after taking a piss. Anne Seidenfaden came into the dreams, with intimations of insecurity and also a good deal of humor, and some raffishness. A certain criminal or half-criminal raffishness, which turned out to be something involving a bank robbery. But that wasn't so bad. It was like I was in on it, in a way. But unpleasant, or maybe piteable, was the character that these dreams took, with touches of fear of loss of money, like some old Frenchwoman afraid of being robbed in her sleep. Or rich people, habitual first-class travelers who don't know just where their money is at.
(These dreams were dreamed in my berth in my cabin on board the night boat from Copenhagen to Århus, the D.F.D.S. motorship H.P. Prior.)
Dream night of Thursday, 24 September 1969 (Torsminde Hotel)
In one of the dreams last night Julia and I were walking by the harbor along the quay, down at Frihavnen (the Free Port) in Copenhagen. Down there on the mole where that schooner had made it after having collided with another ship, then sank at its moorings. We were walking along down there and there was this guy. I was walking on Julia's left and she was walking next to the water, and there was this guy walking on my left and he was dressed very nondescriptly. Like, something like those gray chino pants, maybe they were khaki, but they were washed a lot. And a plaid cotton shirt. And a skinny belt with a long tongue that's sort of hanging down at the end. And he tries his best to walk exactly in pace with me. And we don't realize what he is doing until we feel my thoughts, like, slipping out of one of my ears. Something like that. He's a, yeah, well, so we push him into the water.
Dream night of Friday, 25 September 1969 (Daddy's birthday)
A dream about seeing Ulla, Gerd's Ulla. Either Tove or Janne told me that Ulla had tuberculosis. Really bad. A terrible case of TB. I wonder if she is dead, now, because the dream I had of her last night seemed as if it was coming from the world of the dead. And Ulla was so beautiful. So fantastically beautiful. And I could see her and smell her, and she was arranging her hair and I told her that she was beautiful, and she laughed and said, "Yes, why shouldn't I be? It's for you. It's all for you."
And then there was a series of visions, or impressions, of the dead and their state of being, where they are in a kind of unison or unanimity, in a sub-temporal chamber. This sub-temporal chamber is of gigantic proportions, yet it is full of chinks where the wind whistles through or into, or at least it can be heard whistling outside and sometimes through these chinks. The state of unison of the dead is such that any disturbance produces a huge resonance in the place. And during this dream, or the impressions, there was some disturbance, like the lid being lifted off a beehive. The lid of a beehive being lifted off, and then replaced. Not roughly, but the very act made a cataclysmic jarring, not like thunder but maybe its opposite. And then the dead hummed all at once.
I just remembered a dream I had several years ago, about getting to a
mole or jetty in a lake, in the evening, coming out there by train. Then getting on a boat and crossing the lake at night. Sleeping in a cabin in the boat, and arriving at a port on the lake, then getting into another train. Something like the big lakes of Sweden.
Dreams night of Saturday, 26 September 1969
I dreamed I went to visit Marshal Tito and his wife in their home in Jugoslavia. And they had a very comfortable parlor, in the dream, something like eighteen-seventies furnishings but very comfortable. And they were old-folks types, like he took off his shoes. Just as homey and folksy as could be. But the old lady - he would call over to her - opened a hatch in the side of the wall. It was beside the table, like the panelling or storage space which would be found under a window seat. But she, for some reason, opened it and I saw something I shouldn't have seen. At first I thought it was a baby carriage, but now that I think about it it was a doll buggy. An old-fashioned high wheeled doll buggy, in white chintz. And on the front of this doll buggy is fastened a stick on which is flying the Finnish flag. This Finnish flag, instead of a blue cross, has a black and blue cross. And it is hand-made, like painted on by a kid, or scribbled on with Crayolas, or some other makeshift. But it really gave me the creeps. And I guess I wasn't alone in visiting the Titos. I was alone, all right, but I like recognized it immediately and winked to Julia. And she winked back. And about the baby carriage, there is something wrong with my having seen it. Because Mr. and Mrs. Tito are pretty uptight about it, she especially. But something happens. Something changes, and pretty soon the room, or I am in a room full of snakes and toads and enormous lizards. Huge toads and frogs, Great ottomans, footstools of toads and frogs, and lizards. But I don't mind, Heh. heh. They are loathsome. Really disgusting beauts. But it's okay, I can pick 'em up and drop 'em with a plop.
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Dreams of Julia and her bod, in scrupulous detail. What if I only had eyes for that? For her. If I only had a nose for her? But I don't, I'm glad. Yeah. Some other Momma's spaghetti.
Monday, 29 September 1969 (Liflandsgade, Copenhagen)
In a dream last night I saw a cover of a magazine something like Scientific American, and on it was a photograph of a ship being inundated by a gigantic wave. Just one enormous wave that swamped the entire vessel, hull and rigging and sails and everything. There were rope-ends flying about in the wind, and it happened so fast that the sails and everything were still standing. They weren't even torn away by the water, just - SMASH! And the caption under the photograph was: Al's last whaling voyage.
Dream, 30 September 1969
Tony (Cowan) had been pestering his Dad to let him and his friends come along to a piece of property that his Dad had just bought, and camp out on the grass in their sleeping bags. This was a piece of property that Tom Cowan had bought and was going to build a house on. So Tom said, "All right, but just wait a minute. Just let me get it ready for you." And here I am driving along with Tony and some of his friends in an old Buick. Or maybe even an old Cadillac. Well, finally we get to the place. It's a corner lot, and Tom Cowan has torn everything down. He has razed the house that was standing there earlier, and left one tree standing. And that tree, standing alone in the lot, is completely surrounded by red tiles all over the ground. There is absolutely nothing there except those tiles. There isn't even a blade of grass poking up.
In the dream I got the feeling I used to have of envying Tony's accoutrements, his doodads and his suitcase.
Dreams, 4 October 1969
A loving couple, a young man and a young woman, are traveling alone. They hitchhike and are picked up by a rough customer of a homosexual. He has a shotgun of very high quality, and this shotgun is an object of fear and awe, and genuine admiration because of its very good workmanship. There is something about a threat. The homosexual drives off to a summer cabin in the woods, where horses have been. He lets the couple overnight there, but there is an implied threat. He doesn't exactly brandish the shotgun but leaves it lying pointed in meaningful directions. There is a TV set in the cabin and there happens to be a program from Finland which the young man watches. The program is in Finnish and he listens very carefully to the language, can't make out much of it, but there are a couple of words that he does make out very plainly. There is a shot of some birds, some turkey-like carrion fowl, turning down a path. One of the birds is wearing a box on which there are shingle-like feathers, and the word which coincides with this particular shot is a Finnish equivalent of Aadseldal (in Danish), or Carrion Valley, Carriondale, Carrion Gulch. Meaning a place where the male members, the householders, of a community would throw their garbage, a common dumping ground in the form of a small, short indentation in the earth leading downwards to a pit where the juices from this refuse would gather.
Then the man comes back and tells the couple to get in the car because they're going for a ride. They are going on with their journey. And they do, and to their surprise the man, instead of starting the car - or he does start it and drives a short ways, then stops and gets out of the front seat and gets into the back seat with them, with the shotgun. And he does a very surprising thing. In one barrel - he doesn't open the breech, he puts something down the muzzle. It is a 12 gauge or a 10 gauge, or maybe even a 6 gauge, a very large-bore double barrel shotgun. And in the right barrel he puts a crumpled up piece of zinc piping, and in the left barrel he sticks a shotgun shell. And he says "Now watch this." And he picks up a hammer and strikes the detonater of the shotgun shell and bloop!, it fires into the gun from the muzzle. And he opens up the breech, and it smokes and there's some refuse of some kind, some kind of debris, like buckshot and a piece of zinc pipe. And he says - all this time the couple have been really scared - but he says, "That's how you get it warm on a cold day." And the young man says, "Ah. Thanks for showing me. I would never have guessed. I thought you had to go through shooting off a whole lot of rounds."
The couple are already indebted to him – for not killing them.
So they are driven to a railroad station. And they get on the train, in the very last car. Only two thirds of the car is a passenger car and the rest, to all outward appearances, resembles a baggage section. So they sit down in the coach, and some more people get on and the train starts rolling. The young man goes off to explore some more of the car, and he gets into the rear section and discovers that it is somebody's private dwelling. And he and the girl go back there and, lo and behold, it's an arsty-craftsy woman a little bit older than the girl, like the girl is in her twenties and the artsy-craftsy woman is in her thirties. But she does small things for them: there is pottery and weaving and bright colors, there are potted plants and in the back there is a balcony. The back of it is something like the poop of an old time warship, a ship of the line. But not as ornate as that. It is also more like a California-Spanish patio house. But they fool around in there for a while. The artsy-craftsy woman says that a meal is going to be prepared and maybe the young woman can help them, her and her guests. So they go back to the passenger car, and it has become more crowded now. There are a lot of old people, middle-aged and elderly, gabbing, making a lot of noise, having a good time. The interior of the car is wood-panelled like a Danish passenger car, and there is no hint, no indication in it that the rest of the car could be for some other use than that of public transport. So along comes their benefactor, the Old Homosexual, the hard-as-steel sharp-as-diamonds queer. And he says to them, like, "Come on upstairs. Let's get on with this. Gonna fix a meal." And together with him they make their way to the back of the car, and at the extreme end – there is a small vestibule which is in certain respects like a light-lock in a large photographic darkroom – there aren't any doors to be opened or closed but just a walk around a couple of corners. And just inside this there is like a hallway in a Danish office building, in the center of Copenhagen. To the left are some painted wood name plaques on the front of a glass door, with stairs leading up on the other side. This is to the left just inside the light lock. To the right is an open door leading into a hobby shop with a waiting room, and the old homosexual motions for them to have a seat for a minute. He's got to take care of something. So they sit down. A couple of Danish postmen come in and they raise their eyebrows and nod significantly to the young couple, as if to say "Something's up!" And they deposit their mail in the letter slot in the glass door on the other side of the hall.
In the meantime the couple are sitting on the waiting room chairs, and some people come out of the hobby shop itself. A woman looks at the young man and smiles, and cocks an eye over toward the exhibit, which is in the form of a three-dimensional photograph in a light box, as if saying "have a look at that." Or, "You'd better take a look at that." So the young man gets up and goes over to the light box, which is on the wall, and looks inside, Meanwhile, the couple have realized that the hobby shop is actually a nest of CIA agents. But he looks into this light box, and it's a 3-D photographic view from above of a room in the Smithsonian Institute. The room is full of aircraft from World War II. In the foreground is an enormous airplane. At first the young man takes it for the B-19, but then he realizes that it is a B-17. A Flying Fortress. It's beautiful. In the background are a couple of B-29s, perhaps the B-29s which dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. (What were the names of the bombs? "Little Joe" and "The Fat Man.") But he marvels at the Flying Fortress. It's like he can get inside the light box and descend to any level he desires in order to inspect the objects on display in the museum. Inside and off to one side is a large doorway with jet engines hanging perpendicular to the floor; in the further room are older aircraft, pre-WW II jobs. The Spirit of St. Louis is in there too. But the young man takes a look at this Flying Fortress and is amazed at its beauty and the details of its construction, the riveting, the engine cowlings. He walks in back of the wing and sees that behind the engine cowlings are various vanes and fins to direct the exhaust in the form of afterburners which have the function of compasses. While he is looking at the airplane women sing sweetly to him from concealed loudspeakers. One of the songs they sing is "The Times They Are a Changin'." This is being sung while he scrutinizes the bomber's gunnery, 20mm machine guns, 50mm cannons, and the tail gunner's pod and other armament which the plane is bristling with. And while he is looking at this arsenal - he is both appalled by and in admiration of it - the voices are singing anti-war protest songs very sweetly and lyrically. So he goes back to his girl, and the old homosexual says, "Come on up, Let's get this show on the road. We're gonna prepare a meal and have a party." And so they go upstairs, and there are five more people arriving who are to be seated separately from the others. But the girl, the young woman, helps the other women up there make the meal - and the young man makes himself interesting and looks around and is entertaining. But he gets hungry. He gets really hungry, and so he walks into the rear section of the dwelling, of the private compartments of this railroad car. And in the back, in the very rear, like on the back porch where there should be a washing machine and mops, he discovers half of a meal on a plate. Now, the meal was cold but still fresh, and he knows that the meal had been intended for him at some time and that he had eaten half of it, or somebody else had because he hadn't eaten it himself. And there it was, still waiting for him. The meal consists of slices of potato, like discs of potato, and a slice of salami and maybe a slice of onion. It isn't much, but he goes back into the kitchen and finds a fork. It's a tarnished old fork which hasn't been polished. And he goes back out and uses the fork to eat the meal, the half of a meal. And it stills his hunger. And then he returns to the rest of the company. But something has changed. It has become something else, has changed to a state of antagonism, and he like goes up on the roof of the car, which has a walkway up there. And it has become something else. It has become like a dockside warehouse, or a construction company motor pool and supply depot. And there is some terrific antagonism going on, and he is worried about what is happening with his girl downstairs. But in the meantime he is completely engaged in fighting off enemies. The Old Homosexual is in on this. There are more homosexuals on the way and he feels himself threatened by these guys, and downstairs are dikey women maybe threatening his girl. And he has to fight these people off. He is up there on the roof and down below his enemy is coming at him with a weapon, a deadly weapon. He can see it poking up over the roof at him. The enemy has various ways of getting up there. There are stairs, and ramps and different modes of access. And they have a regular duel. The young man tired to take cover from the weapon,which is fired and comes close to getting him. He hurls down large objects used for building purposes, tries to hit his enemy or to put the objects between them. The enemy dodges the missles.And finally the enemy is coming up the steps, and the young man sees it coming. And so he heaves these things down there, prefabricated partitions with metal lathing, etc., heavy but movable objects. And he throws one of these things down and gets the enemy. Breaks his leg Wham! Smash, right there on the steps. But it turns out to be a woman. His enemy was a woman, and he has hurt her. He has injured her, broken her leg, which turns out to be some kind of unforgivable crime - that he has injured a woman. And so the young man finds himself in the position of being committed to homosexuality.
Dream night of Monday, 13 October 1969
I was given a ride back from vacation, and on the way back down to Paris driving along the coast somewhere, on some kind of coast road, we came to a place where there had been an accident. It was in a bathing village, a seaside resort, and there were Gypsie wagons along the side of the road and dead horses. A lot of them. The horses were either dead or dying, and the Gypsies had them inside their wagons, the necks sticking out the front and propped on a washtub or the like, and blankets over the horses more as an act of mourning than an effort to revive them. There were dead horses, these noble animals, and there was very little blood around, like it had been cleaned up, or maybe licked up. One of the last wagons had its dead horse up on top, offering a dead horse up to the Sun, or to Heaven, or to the birds, to the sight of God and man.
Thursday, 30 October 1969
It's 11:25 in the evening and I have just had a very striking dream. I was doing things with Janne and Kirsten in houses and in homes, different places where they were living other than Nyelandsvej, and it was more like on a level of brother and sister instead of anything like an outwardly sexual couple arrangement. But Janne was doing a lot of very important self-improvement, and it was as though she and I were on our way to a reconciliation and renewal of our life together. Janne had begun writing, or keeping a diary in which she wrote her thoughts. Some very interesting and important thoughts. I was reading some of them and they mentioned MacGuire, that Catholic guy in Bellevue. In certain ways they were Catholic oriented, like Catholicism was a big problem for her and something she was wrestling with in her mind. Page after page of self-searching and reflecting on the world in general. She was always close-mouthed about her feelings, and so she would explode now and then. But in the dream I am going through these writings of hers, lying in bed doing it, and I get the impression of some Catholic scheme, some sort of shadow cabinet. Well, Janne comes in and suggests that we go back into town – Copenhagen – with this older couple. We are going to take the train – an old local running in the middle of the night – back into Copenhagen, and in getting ready to go we are going to take baths. I have been looking in a book, an expensive photography book in large format and with unusual photographs of the National Geographic kind. There is one series of photographs taken by a Mexican Indian with a camera he had got hold of, of a drowned man floating in a swamp. In Mexico, like where the Indians cultivate their corn or some other crop. But here are these old men wading out in the bog, and the sun is orange and setting, and this old corpse is floating there on its back, and the old men are lined up in a Vee. They are performing some kind of ceremony with the corpse, a kind of prayer meeting, and in the water is a dab of blood. There are more pictures in the same series, of children in the water with blood coming out of their mouths and staining the water around them. But Janne and I are getting ready to go and we are going to take baths and there is hot water being heated somewhere. A lady comes into the room and goes out of it, and she is somehow familiar to me, and it is as though Janne and I are suddenly downstairs and out in the garden of the place, and it is very well-kept but old and somehow sinister, with mosses and decay and some kind of fungus. There is a garden path with mossy flagstones, and I notice that down the middle of it is a line of plants the centers of which have been ripped out, like the central stalk and whatever flower had been there. It has simply been very neatly ripped out, or cut out. Janne and I look at each other in astonishment and she is frightened. She looks at me wide-eyed and says, "Ken. Barnard Beaver," And Barnard's mother and aunt are walking in the garden. So I follow the garden path, and lo and behold, there is the aunt or the lady friend of Mrs. Beaver, and a little bit further on Mrs. Beaver herself. They are within sight of each other and they are very well-dressed, very elegantly attired middle-aged ladies. And a little bit further on, walking ahead of them in the garden, is Barnard Beaver. He is the one who has been plucking the centers out of the plants and flinging them to one side. He stands there and he and I greet each other with immediate familiarity. He looks like a big kid, is dressed in a kind of male pedal pushers with plaid cuffs, a Louisa May Alcott cap, and suspenders. He has obviously just come back from his summer camp, that fabled, practically mythic upper-class summer camp in the Sierras that selected children went to. Years ago in Fresno, Barnard and his mother let me inspect a carved archery bow, like a camp cult object; I was considered for going to that camp and probably would have if my folks had been able to afford it. But he and I greet each other and I say, "Oh, hello, Barnard. I was just going to take a bath." And I turn on my heel. Now, a sparrow had been perched on his finger, and the sparrow looks at me and cocks its head as if to say "This guy's crazy!" And I nod to the sparrow. But in the meantime another sparrow has gotten caught in the pages of the book I am holding, the geographic tome, and it is cheeping in there. I'm holding the pages apart with a finger and it is caught in there, so I open the book up and the sparrow flutters away with a very dazed look on its face, like it has been through a painful and somehow harmful experience. But I go back into the house and up the stairs. I am set on taking a bath, but I get to the hot water heater and the gas has been turned off, and there is only a little bit of hot water left in the heater. And then I go into the bathroom. The bathtub is enveloped by a kind of oxblood drapery; it is one of those old-fashioned tubs without any casing around the outside, and it is right up next to the windows. And the windows, tall windows, have oxblood drapes, but separated in places so the gauze curtains can be seen through. They look out on some kind of incredibly decadent square in a city like Rennes – or maybe Louisberg Square in Boston, but not that elegant. I mean something practically out of Palle Nielsen. But I am discouraged from taking a bath in that bathtub. It seems such a drag and it's so evil, and I don't even turn the water on to see if there is any left. I'd had an idea that there was plenty of hot water in the tank, if Barnard hadn't used all of it.
Dreams night of 1 November 1969
Being on board a big old-fashioned battleship, from the days of The Great White Fleet. But this was a German battleship, built in eighteen-something as the largest in a series of five battleships of the same name, the Azuma. And it had one of the largest facilities for melting chocolate, like it was possible to melt four tons of chocolate into cocoa for the crew. The ship had been used for laying cable; it had never fired a shot in anger but was converted, on the verge of some past war, into a cable-laying ship, to lay cable in the more than three thousand miles of the waterways of Germany. And the crew is a kind of motley lot, and the ship's wheel is a big old wheel like on a sailing ship, but amidships. There are thick iron fittings, and it is beautiful in its way. But the ship is berthed on some riverbank, or in some estuary by grassy banks, and I go ashore. I am somehow employed on this ship. I go ashore wearing a uniform and everything, but am caught by one of my superiors who sends me back to the ship. There is a party of one passenger going out, to drink Nescafé. Meanwhile, the cable-laying mechanism, the machinery for paying out the cable, was demonstrated like in old photographs or a motion picture of very good quality from the eighteen-hundreds, contemporary with the time that the ship was actually laying cable. The mechanism was very simple, and of course it resembled the human sexual act. And there was a big fuss to the effect that it must not be referred to in terms other than "that there," and "this that there."
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A dream of traveling with a girl, I think it was Janne, and a cat. And little other paraphernalia. We come to an American-style big old house in a country district, a farmhouse with barn. We go inside and we can hear strange noises upstairs. I look around and an old man comes out, startling me. The whole place is a mess. The farm hasn't been worked for years. An old woman comes down, too, and she has a black bandana around the middle of her head like the hair bands Janne used to wear, and her face itself has a devil mask painted on it, or drawn on it with charcoal and lamp black. And they go through various gyrations which smack of Devil worship. In fact that is what it is. It's the Antichrist, or direct Satanism. What they do is a kind of witchcraft that is extremely specialized, and these people exist only for the function of performing their witchcraft. It consists of an enormous amount of self-sacrifice which takes the form of self-indulgence, and which produces in its objects or subjects - the things and people onto which it is directed - it induces stumbles and slips of the tongue, and small accidents which get in the way of what one was intending to do. And it also induces obsessive-compulsive actions. In the dream these people are going through these things and it is all blacks and whites; their whole thing seems to be concerned with blacks and whites. Negative-positive. And these people are fluttering around in the difference between black and white, or their combinations. And Janne and I have our cat there, and our cat combats their dog. It's a sort of barrel-bodied fox terrier, a "keg of thumbs." Anyway, they go through their incantations, they are into speaking in rhyme, and in their conversation or their monologues they have cyclical talk that comes back to points of reference. Its very weird and disgusting, and I won't have anything to do with it. But Janne is, or appears to be, in her element - if it is Janne. She goes upstairs at the woman's bidding - something I would never do, although I don't see why not. In fact I do. There is a vision to be received up there, of a sort of long asphalt road running up over a hilltop so that it seems to be reaching into heaven. The place is really a clutter. But we have a brush, like a double-ended flat paintbrush, and I inadvertently bump the cat with it and am afraid of having hurt it. But the cat makes it known that it wasn't hurt and that it knows the reason for my having done that, that it is something those people are doing which made me bump my own cat.
We finally get out of there having defeated the arch enemies. Or at least I get out of there. Toward the end of the dream it's like the next morning, and I am clipping the brush with a pair of scissors. It's like it needs clipping. At first it is soft, like a soft wire brush, and I clip starting at one end and work in layers. It's in layers which can be separated. I finish that end and turn it over, then turn it around and start clipping the other end. It gets tougher, a thicker gauge wire, and I get to the end of it. And I am clipping along, and it seems like I am clipping along a coastline, like clipping the dunes, the line of dunes away from the inlets along the west coast of Denmark. And I am sort of hesitant about doing this. And then Bill Thornton's voice comes in and asks, "Don't you want to hear Julie Driscoll sing?" And yeah, I do. So I clip it over. Just clip it out.
25 November 1969
It is 7:30 in the morning and I was dreaming about a rescue action in Vietnam. A destroyer had gone aground off the coast of Vietnam near a naval supply depot. The ship wasn't grounded very far out and a tank went into the water to take the crew off. They were very cool about it. There were pictures of them getting off the destroyer and on to the tank. It was like I was one of those being rescued. And we were going down inside the tank and one of the officers said to me, "Go aft. You've had enough." And I did. I obeyed him and went below in the tank and looked around. I was kind of surprised at the size of it. There were several levels, and down below there were bunks and small compartments, men sitting around, and I sat down next to somebody whose feet I could smell. And I wasn't going to move, and this soldier sort of looked at me from the other side, nodding to me like saying "Feets farts and assholes." And some of the guys started laughing and things were going pretty good. It was a beautiful maneuver. In the back of the tank there was a kind of turret thing going, and it was very interesting.
Now in this rescue tank there were a lot of whores for the benefit of the rescued destroyer crew and the crew of the tank. Some of them started taking off their clothes and just doing things with their clothes like pulling a sleeve down off a shoulder and exposing a tit, and doing dances, and it was very nice. But there was something wrong with just about every one of these women. There were certain blemishes or certain faults, physical faults which were connected with their sexual life. And I was lying on the floor sort of relaxing and grooving on it, just enjoying the whole thing, and there was a certain ambience between me and the women there, And this young good-looking whore and her little daughter started talking to me. They didn't have any pants on underneath their skirts and I could see everything. Now this little girl stood up on my arms and I raised them up and down, and she was just a little girl and I could look up and see her little snatch and it had some smegma in it. I felt a twinge of distaste. And there she was standing on my arms and I was raising her up and down like we were playing together. She was laughing and I was holding on to her legs with a hand around each of her calves. Her mother, a young woman, was right alongside and I could look up her skirt too. And she had old rash marks on her thighs and stomach, like from some kind of venereal disease. Not that she had it then, but from some earlier time. And we joked together. She had some kind of cold sore on her lip, like a cold sore covered with a concealing cosmetic. And the little girl was circumcised. Yeah, I guess she had had all four lips taken away.
But we got ashore and it was like walking in the street in an American city, and at the end of the street there was a cross street which formed an intersection like a T-square. And down there at the crux of the T, the head of it, stood my Dad - I thought of Grandpa, Daddy' father - just as he radiated a certain calmness and levelled a pistol at me and fired, very calmly, and it felt as though I had just been saved in the nick of time. It was terrifying. I woke up.
5 December 1969 (200 Riverside Drive, New York)
This is New York, early in the morning. I just had a dream in which I met Seth at a kind of writing school. And he was going through some sort of voluntary acupuncture of the skull. There were needles sticking out of his skull, and he pulled them out and stuck a few new ones in.
Copyright © 1998 by Kenneth Tindall
