the past year in dreams.

February 26, 2009:
I was at a bathhouse and asked the service lady if I could get the key to a hot tub that some guy was in. She said, “sir, you can’t have sex in the hot tub.” I explained to her that I didn’t want to have sex in the hot tub, that I’d like to have one by myself, but there weren’t any more free. Later some friends were with me, and someone asked why some of us were naked while others were not. I looked over and Katie’s butt was in my face. Poop started to come out of it and drop onto the ground next to me. Then I shouted, “Katie, it’s happening again!” She responded apologetically, “sorry!”

February 25, 2009:
I was trying to get up a very steep rocky mountain to join people from the writing program. While I was going up jagged edges, I looked to my right and saw a group of tourists who had formed a ladder out of hanging on to each other. Then the one at the bottom would climb up everyone else and get to the top. Then the new one at the bottom would climb, and so on. I climbed beyond their destination to the highest part of the mountain where I found Alex Mack and others.

February 9, 2009:
For Eric’s IM project this year, he was camouflaged in a poster and would recite abstract combinations of words while moving around and causing optical illusions between himself and the poster, while also knocking out gradient dots and making them fall to the floor as MnMs in patterns of sound that somehow continued to shake for minutes, all while my professors Sara Roberts and Hillary Kapan would run back and forth putting up new posters for him to blend into. The posters contained Daiana Feuer and Max Kim’s faces in the background.

February 8, 2009:
Jonathan was a “fartuplet.”

January 16, 2009:
I was living or working in my professor Matias’s house, which was small, one-floor, conventionally designed and in the middle of the block (unlike his real life house). Matias made and served three elaborate cakes through the dream but never offered me a slice of any. I invited a cute black guy over from the internet who Matias said was a published writer, and who according to Wikipedia was offered the job as ambassador to Ethiopia but turned it down. He came over and Matias was designing cakes and I was working on something, and he was really shy and didn’t know what to say to me. Meanwhile, Tod appeared at the door drunk with a huge grin on his face, and I told him I couldn’t let him stay with Matias anymore and slammed the door and locked it. Then he stood in the road and jumped in front of a semi, but then jumped out of the way at the last minute, and then screamed at the top of his lungs with his mouth wide open and ran towards the house, then veered away from the house and ran down the street, mouth still open. Then Matias said “that worked, but you could have done better.” Then he compared it to a man who worked at the White House for the past 25 years who hired the presidents.

I was on a road trip with my father, my nephew Jamie and my brother Chris. I had a handful of fresh contact lenses and was looking through my suitcase for something to keep them fresh. Finally, we were outside, and I grabbed a handful of fresh soil and dumped it on top of them. Then I realized that wouldn’t preserve them. After the soil struggle, I found my father, nephew and brother sitting at an outdoor table at Baskin Robbins, which was giving out a special deal of free ice cream in very small cups, but only if you get all the flavors at once. None of the flavors I wanted were left, so I searched through the pile, found and ate some gross one.

January 15, 2009:
I was in some small-ish town in Virginia and had wandered away from friends to find food. I walked into this weird little house where several people stood in a line, and eventually this old black woman would come out and say “dinner is served, come on in” and they would be ushered into her dining room. The wait was really long, as though there was probably just one dining table. When I got to the front of the line, she invited me in, and I was surprised she wouldn’t ask what I wanted to eat. Then I looked behind me and saw Katie and Andrea enthusiastically running towards me from the other entrance of the house, which was connected to a Wal-Mart Supercenter. “How many people can I have eating with me?” “Just one,” she said.

It was 6 AM in Silverlake or somewhere, and I was climbing over a fence so I could get up to a guy’s house that I was infatuated with. Brett and some other friends were there, climbing behind me. At some point I realized that there was no way we could make it up the steep hill and over the series of fences and walls, so I turned around, accidentally putting my foot on one of the heads of the people climbing with me. I moved my foot out of the way, was apologetic, and realized it was some kind of large bird of prey I had just put my foot on. Everyone else laughed and said “Oh!” and the bird’s name and that it wasn’t a big deal. Then, they all got down, and I still needed to, but went a different way, which involved walking by a house’s window too noisily. We were all the way down the street when I looked back and saw an angry man running down to get us because he heard us trespassing. My friends saw and didn’t care, moseying into a corner convenience store. I began to run, but new I couldn’t get away fast enough.

January 12, 2009:
My father and I were driving from Santa Fe and I fell asleep. When I awoke, we were in Sunland Park, near the Mexican border, and I jeered my father for being so absent minded. The ground and buildings were bright orange and the sky dusty.

January 9, 2009:
My aunt and uncle from Vermont moved to Santa Fe, and they lived in a big stucco house with fake structures caked onto it that made it look kind of like the Needle Mountains. A skylight went up through their very tall living room through the floor into a bedroom on the third floor where I was staying, and every sound I made could be heard in the living room. I didn’t want them to know I was gay, but a very cute guy was there who was apparently a distant cousin through remarriage, but I knew they would call it incest in addition. My cousin Keith lived in their garage and was a painter (in real life he works on the lumber yard with my uncle). Amarantha and I had come to visit them on a road trip. We were walking along a road that looked like the Eldorado area, and some woman yelled something at me from her car. Amarantha and I had driven back and forth from the Pacific to the Atlantic in a few days. While in a small town in Virginia, I overheard someone listening to “Smack Jack” by Nina Hagen in their car, and I wanted to talk to them. They parked near me as though they were expecting me, but then drove off when I didn’t approach them.

December 22, 2008:
I was speaking French among a group of people. I used the word “enfantes” when I was talking to a guy I didn't know, and then everyone said that meant “love” and that I was actually in love with him.

December 15, 2008:
I opened my front door, and just outside was a forty-foot drop because I hadn't pushed the button to activate the stairs. Daiana Feuer was down below with someone else, sitting with her legs in a v-shape like she was doing yoga. There was a lake about ten feet behind her on the opposite side of me, and the sky and water were a colorless grey. I accidentally dropped a giant block of cheese and it bounced right between her legs and then bounced really high and back and forth between walls. And then there was something whipping around that I could barely catch sight of, and Katie was in my apartment and said, "oh no it's the water-to-earth worm!" From what I recall, the worm was just an expressive hand-drawn line. The last image in my head was of Daiana’s concerned face as the water-to-earth worm bounced above her.

November 20, 2008:
Erica wouldn’t tell us, but someone figured out that she had gotten an engagement ring but sold it to a melter for cash.

November 8, 2008:
I dreamt that my new car was a submarine with five windows on each side. I had to brave the tumultuous waves around Japan, but in the dream the ocean didn’t seem so deep or dark. It was more like driving through an afternoon thunderstorm.

November 2, 2008:
I was worried that I had missed certain classes too much, just by completely forgetting I had them. I wandered into an office at school because Sam Cohen was in there and wanted to say “hi.” Then I kept going (I followed her?) and ended up in some theatre area. There was a big pool, and a lot of people began to arrive. Some of them got in the pool while others stood around and watched. We were handed ancient texts in the form of boxes, one inside another, with the script printed fancily at the bottom of each box. As soon as the performance of the first box ended, we walked to a pool diagonally below the previous one. At the second pool there were hot tubs. I was wearing shorts, and I took off my shoes to dip my legs in the water. Then, this gay guy told me I shouldn’t be in the water because I’m intruding on his leg space, like I wasn’t allowed there because there were enough people. Eventually he swam away and found an area where he could stretch out. Alex Castle came up and started massaging my back as if we were dating, and I told him about the guy, and he was angry. I was embarrassed to be seen with Alex, because he was wearing an ugly hat. After another level of pools, at the last floor, I walked alone but among people through a maze with art installations of lights. In between each installation there were huge assortments of candy on the walls, and I kept finding tasty chips.

October 18, 2008:
School was starting and I had a new living situation in a room several people shared that must have been in the middle of school, because when I woke up there was some kind of administrative line that began to encroach my bed. After I wandered around half-awake and figured this out, I crawled back into my bed and made sure the people in line knew that they were on it. Francisco and Joyce were the two last people to join the line, and when they saw me I think they felt surprised that I was being so grumpy.

Then, everyone went to this dance party hosted by Anna Oxygen. She had set up a stage that rotated on its own, and certain pieces of the stage would spread apart or spin (sort of like live mini tectonic plates). I took off all my clothes but my underwear and stood on a plate that kept getting wider and spinning, so I had to readjust my legs quite a bit to avoid doing the splits. Anna was lying still on a plate and singing nonchalantly into a microphone. Then we had to get off the stage because either no one was there yet or too many people were there already.

October 3, 2008:
Katie and I lived together on the beach. There was a monstrous earthquake, and a pit of lava formed in our driveway and swallowed up both her and her car, but thankfully, I copied her and pasted her right before that, so she continued as a copy of herself. At the last minute, I also reached into her car and grabbed a bag that had all my possessions in it. Neo-Pulchritude (a stuffed animal turtle I own) was lightly charred. We spent the ensuing moments playing with the video games installed inside him. On a screen on his belly, he could make the appearance of a bar, and he was a cheesy-digital bartender in the image. He also had features that emulated a computer very realistically, although everything was ultimately fake.

I was in Old Town Albuquerque just after sunset across the southeast corner of the park with Jackson (a guy I know from school) and someone else. We were walking around, and then cops showed up down the road, so he and his friend got really agitated and got naked and caused a fuss like they wanted to be arrested. I went inside the only gallery still open, but it was in the process of closing, and I couldn’t figure out how to get to the little shop. Alex and Bordeaux showed up, and I pretended not to be as excited to see them as I really was. They kept imitating exotic animal calls, especially Bordeaux, and it surprised me at first how they could contort their bodies.

September 24, 2008:
Erica had lost a lot of weight but started wearing a fat suit, just so one day she could suddenly appear on campus as a waif and surprise everybody.

September ?, 2008:
I was watching tvguide channel, and on the "best of tv that's not Americana" channel there was a show on called "irony" and the episode was of an attractive masculine guy who gets beat up by a bunch of guys.

July 26, 2008:
My father and I were on our way to a furniture store, or maybe it was school. We might have let Christmas pass by without our knowing. He backed out of our driveway and rammed into my car. When we went out to look, the hood was popped upwards and holes burnt through it. Later we were driving on a dirt road alongside the freeway, hoping to find an in. We might have been headed toward Arizona.

Driving through the woods, Katie and I found ourselves on the top of an exaggeratedly steep and tall hill. We looked down the other side and I thought to myself that it seemed like a bad idea. Across the way, there were some people high up in a tree that was about as high as the hill we had ascended. As she pushed on the accelerator, I leapt out of the car and swung from a tree branch. She went flying down the hill, crashed into the ground, then her car bounced up all the way to the people in that tree, nearly hit them, then came back down and crashed completely. She didn’t emerge from the wreck, and I was equally worried about her fate as well as my own, because my finger could barely hang on to the branches, and the distance to the bottom of the tree was as tall as the hill itself.

I was supposed to hang out with a fellow from the internet. We met in his neighborhood, but when he met me he walked away. I went looking for him, the streets seeming like Echo Park or Toluca Lake, and ended up at a Goodwill in the middle of residential area. He was there with other friends whom I knew through him but had never actually met. He scampered out the door while they said “hi” and were very nice to me.

Then I ended up at some party with a guy who might have been Asher’s ex, because I had been in the house before when Asher said his ex lived there. The living room was two overlapping squares with the floor of one being three feet higher than the other, but a triangle cut out of it with descending stairs to sit on, and giant pillows that worked as puzzle pieces in the triangle to refill the cavity of the square. The guy looked a lot like Joey Labriola, this guy I dated a while ago. Before we all fell asleep there, it was a raucous time in the streets. Two kids flew by, and the guy who looked like Joey said it was the latest craze. If you drink this product and wear the shoes, it makes you fly. I had all but forgotten about it when I woke up, but then it came back to mind. I searched for the remains of the drink. The Joey lookalike pointed me to some remaining residue in a glass and scooped it with his pointer finger for a taste. It was like congealed energy drink.

July 14, 2008:
Someone’s art was an image of an attractive woman posing. But she looked skeletal, and her skull was also seen in a pattern on the wallpaper behind her.

July 6, 2008:
My mother was there and gave me a hug, and I called her “Mommy” and told her that I had dreams about her coming back to life and how I would try telling her I loved her in my dreams but that it’d never work out like this time.

(Fell back asleep, had another dream.)
I was with relatives—maybe Harold and Cass?—and was forced to jump onto a train cart going down tunnels through the mountains. I kept dropping my stuff on the side of the tracks and having to stop the cart and pick them up. It held up many people behind us, but I wasn’t about to leave anything behind. Then I took buses and went all the way back to the house, in an unfamiliar city. Its layout reminded me of London maybe? It was raining outside and this woman in the house wasn’t taking care of the place at all, so I put a towel where a water leak was dripping down onto Harold’s sofa. Then I walked up the street and through a mall. It was big and palace-like and I went out the front. It was kind of like an airport or the New York Public Library. I exited through the front, and they had a line for people to leave. There was an overweight woman telling me what to do. I quickly veered away from her and found a way to get around the line and out through a gap in their system. The clouds had cleared, and the sky and trees were deep blues and greens. I ran into some fellow right there who was pretty handsome, and I got him to come with me on my walk, and we held hands. Somehow the walk turned into being on a bus with him and his relatives, and I spent a good while talking to his sister about his moving to LA from Toronto or Chicago or wherever we were, so that he could move in with me.

July 5, 2008:
I was in Texas just east of the NM border on I-40 and I needed a place to stay for the night. So I lay down in a miniature room in front of someone’s house opening towards the street. The people living there came out and wondered who I was, but they let me stay there anyway.

July 1, 2008:
I was in a pool with Matias and his boyfriend David. We were all naked, and Matias’s legs started touching mine. Katie walked up and waved and said “hi.” Then she introduced herself to Matias, and said “nice to meet you.”

May 22, 2008:
I was in a town in Utah that had the steepest average slope of any town. It was populated by people from CalArts essentially. I brought with me a huge tub of hot water that I sat in, while everyone else trudged around me in the snow and thought I was odd or wished they could jump in. When the water was too cold to sit in, I poured it out, and it made a huge hole in the town’s steep hill. One fellow led me around the hill to a secret place.

May 18, 2008:
I was staying in a house in West LA with several people, one of whom was a cousin. I climbed down a mountain in Bel Air to get there, sometimes having to make careful leaps off rocks or cement slabs to get down. The cousin and I wanted to sleep together. Sometimes he was attractive. Later I was in McDonald’s with Alex Castle. When we came back, I ate something off the floor and felt sick. Two ladies in another room of the house gave me some medicine to settle my stomach. I didn’t need it, but finished it because it tasted good. One of them used a nylon lunchbox to pick up the item, part of which I ate off the floor, and then threw it away as well as the lunchbox. I felt like that was a waste. When I looked in their trash, I saw a bunch of hoodies being thrown out, too.

Someone’s dog was shrunk to about two inches tall, and we all gathered around in an office to play with it. Its proportions were tall, long and thin, almost that of a horse. I put the tiny dog on Kalu’s back, and Kalu gave it rides everywhere.

We went to Essex Junction, Vermont. I was excited that my friends could see the lumberyard and meet my grandmother. There was a lot of snow in the road. I threw a boulder-size chunk really far, and then a car honked from a distance, so I ran out and removed it. A bunch of people showed up with me, and we were all lying on the ground in front of my grandmother’s kitchen window, which now faced south and was on the east side of Jericho Road. There were gay men kissing all around me, many of them very cute in a “hipster” way. My grandmother had some old lady friends over, and I knew they must be thinking homophobic thoughts. A lot of the gay men left pretty soon though anyways. Flint was there in a harness and some man was helping her walk up a steep hill into the woods. When she got halfway out of sight into the darkness of trees, the man pulled her backwards against a sling, and she went flying down the hill and into the air, and then a rope pulled her back down and she went flying back towards the sling, which now visibly looked like a little man, but made out of fabric. Flint seemed disappointed with her project, saying the little fabric man cost her over $2000.

May 16, 2008:
I met Barbara Guest, and she was really friendly to me.

April 15, 2008:
It was at night and I was on a big boat on a lake with a bunch of other people. There were friendly old people standing in line who talked to me. The boat was wooden and barge-like. My father walked up, and I called him “Daddy” and everyone applauded when I hugged him. I felt embarrassed.

April 13, 2008:
Jenny (girl on MySpace who talks to me but I’ve never met) was some neighborhood girl that I’d run into. I lived somewhere that looked halfway between Silverlake and my old neighborhood in Albuquerque: clean, somewhat spacious, concrete, hilly roads and big yards.

March 26, 2008:
I was taking a language class at Cal State LA (or maybe it was UNM or PCC), although it was listed under the art department and required a lot of reading and presenting and watching videos, all of which seemed to have nothing to do with language. I wasn’t paying attention, or I left early, and the teachers were mad at me. To make things worse, after one class, I was naked in the corner next to the entrance trying to change clothes. They made me feel bad about it, like I was unwelcome. I ran into Jill in the parking lot, and when I told her what happened, she was enraged. She and two friends got in two cars and chased security guards around a parking lot that looked like the old West Hollywood Pavilions, sort of. Eventually there was a wreck, and her friend (who looked like her friend Erica in real life sort of) was hit really badly and car totaled. Jill was somewhat angry about it from then on, but really just wanted me to show appreciation for her standing up for me. The next time I returned to the class, I went to use the bathroom, and it was covered in framed photos of me. To get to the bathroom, there would also be a bedroom to walk through, and that’s where the photos mostly were. There were many photos of me from my early childhood that I had never seen before. There were also many gloves, and a picture of Jeremy/Jay from my writing program. I took this gesture as a sign of an apology from the teachers as well as recognition of my birthday.

March 19, 2008:
I was driving alone and wound up in a city in northwestern Wyoming. I think it was Casper. A map I had was making it seem like all roads went in and out of Casper, and it made Casper look like a major city, even though it was small (as it is in real life). I tried taking a US highway going southwest, but I ended up going west on a smaller highway. I found myself at a crossing of the Missouri River, which was at the border of Wyoming and Idaho. The traffic was bad, and the river was on a bridge, so the cars just went under it. I was trying to turn around in Idaho, maybe Coeur d’Alene. I saw a cute guy on the street and thought I should drive by him to see him better. There was a cop, but I wasn’t afraid because my license plate was updated finally.

Somewhere in that dream, or maybe just before where it started, I was still in Wyoming, and my grandparents and aunt and uncle were all there. We were in this very large concrete building. I was looking at my uncle and thinking if I resembled him at all. My father showed up while we were all in the parking lot. He was acting standoffish and got naked, to which I responded that he was making it difficult for others to relate with him.

March 14, 2008:
I was in the house I grew up in, preparing to read stories I made through talking to my father on the phone. It was a Sprawl reading. I was up next, but I still had to do some preparing. I was rushing to gather my little pieces of purple and yellow jello and yellow sand that I eventually stuffed in my mouth. Jared Woodland from the writing program yelled out something like, “it sucks making us wait.” I said, “do any of you find it unhelpful when someone says something like that when you’re in a hurry?” And Brittany Goode and a few others raised their hands.

March 5, 2008:
I was with Alex S (my ex), and we were walking around a big hospital-like building, sort of like Cal Arts, but we were also staying in rooms in it. I was feeling like I wanted to tell him I was still interested in him, but wouldn’t dare (I'm not in real life). I went into his bathroom to pee, and the toilet was like a big pool and also a clogged shower floor. It had his pee in it, so I peed in it too, to make my own scent present again.

February 15, 2008:
My father and I were leaving the house I grew up in to go somewhere. We got in the car, and that’s when I started noticing differences. The car was identical except it had that fake wooden paneling. As we were driving, I figured out he got the car mixed up, and the key happened to work on this other car anyway. A bird jumped in out of nowhere, looking really frilly and iridescent and acting friendly. I was surprised. And there was an egg even bigger than this bird sitting in the back seat, and it cracked open making way for an even larger bird. We had some kind of special food to give them, and that would prove somehow that they were a certain kind of bird, and maybe the purpose of that was so we could identify the owner.

I was sitting in an audience, I think. There were gay men around me, and maybe we were all naked. I may or may not have known most of them. Katie was there but sitting in a different row. She was excited by how physically friendly gays are to each other. Some guy performing on stage had his cock out, and everyone cheered for me to lick it, so I did. I let some guy hold me, and I kept trying to fall asleep. The guy who held me and I both got up and headed with some fellow outside. At first we were driving, and I ran a red light which helped us move far really quick. I saw Anna Schmitt on the street and said to the guy with me, “that’s my friend Anna,” and then she said, “yes I am” as she walked by. We were on bikes now, definitely on the steepest hill I’d ever seen, surrounded with green and sidewalks like Echo Park. I recalled trying to drive it but failing to get to the top. I had to walk my bike because it got so steep. I almost lost my balance in a few moments. We were in Susan Howe’s house, except she was Anne Bray. We were in her living room, on some high floor, and I climbed onto the frame of the window to see out. As I did so, her son walked through the living room, but neither of us said ‘hi’ so I felt like an intruder. As I was scooting, I moved a few pieces of dead leaf, and they fell right by her. She looked up, and the guy and I both waved. I couldn’t see her face because for some reason I couldn’t turn to look that way, so she was outside the frame of my glasses, not sure why I was wearing them. We went to a floor of her house that was like a fake jungle, just fabricated landscapes of some kind. She told us about a friend of hers who died in there, and how the company who helped her build it also helped his family lose a lawsuit. I was happy for her, because I thought it was foolish he would put himself at risk, even though I didn’t really know what happened exactly.

February 12, 2008:
My father and I were living in a mansion now; I think we moved because my mother died. My room came with many odd decorations including a disembodied head sitting on a beam just under the high ceiling. This man could talk, and I worried that I had to keep his rotting head from falling down, because I cared about him. It was snowy outside.

(Later after falling back asleep)
I was at Oxy, but it was a huge mansion with many floors reserved for visitors and grad students, and it was in Burbank. It was almost like a mall, but definitely also like someone’s gigantic house. It seemed like a candy convention was happening, because all these candy products were everywhere. I stole a big gumball thing and a large bag of some kind of fluffy candy. There were security checks and guards, but I managed to make my way through. It was nighttime now. On the way out, the parking lot looked like that of a fairground. A lot of random products were sitting out in big piles. I stole a pack of tarot cards and a fancy Tori Amos picture book, both of which with the intention of selling on eBay later. All this stuff was stuffed under my jacket.

January 26, 2008:
Kalu was losing all his quills. He looked furry beneath them, almost chipmunk-like.

Amarantha and I were at a public pool next to a mall. I kept going into the mall wearing only a shirt.

I was at CalArts in Integrated Media next year. Katie was in the class, too, and she was sitting next to a weird looking girl with a dog resemblant of a rat. There were these two artists hosting the event, and at one point they got in their underwear and into a kiddy pool. They also showed home videos of them in their small bedroom that they shared. I got up and sat next to Katie on the floor, and she pushed me down so that she could massage my back while we watched the guest artists.

There were cute guys with small unerect penises, and I began to wonder if all men had penises that small when not erect. When I looked again, they had bulbous bellies where their necks should be, and the small penis dangling beneath, and then the real belly, also bulbous, beneath those.