They were in the parking lot of a semi-arid grassland which recalled the Palo Alto Baylands. There were some “saru” in the trees (Macaca cyclopsis or Macaca fuscata). She attempted to take photos of them, but the shutter button kept on sticking. As she fiddled with it she came to believe that a tiny spine or twig had broken into it, and soon some fragments of a pale blond glochid came out. There were plenty of monkeys, so even if they moved away, she had many opportunities to photograph them. Some other families noticed her taking pictures of the monkeys and then pointed them out to their children, but the attention didn’t last. She then found a black sticky wound in the middle of her palm, which seemed to involve a splinter.
Her mom then got out of the car and she asked her where the leftovers were, in reference to the food her mom’s mother had prepared on the evening of arrival in Taipei. She said that they had been distributed to other people’s houses. The dreamer felt very upset upon hearing this, as she had wanted to eat more of that food so badly. Then she asked her mother where her laptop was, and instead of answering, she stared into her eyes with a grim but somewhat neutral expression. The dreamer became even sadder, and assumed it meant that her mother had taken the laptop away and distributed it to some other family. The sadness accumulated into an incredibly “ripe” sob, which felt a bit like an orgasm. She woke up in actual tears, but the impulse to cry left almost immediately after it came. The dream was pleasurable. It gave her some lines of association to wend her way around during the day: the tar-black wound on the hand was like the “smack” that she had found at the entrance of my cunt in the earlier dream “about” her analyst, in which she had delivered a drug to Vincent Lindon so that he could administer it to his ailing father. The thorns brought to mind the glochids which had stuck to her hands after she had unknowingly harvested prickly pears from a neighborhood plant at Stanford. That was the morning before I found out that Savitri had blocked me. That incident prefigured the incident in which I cut my finger and fainted, and got stitches, and stopped playing the cello, after having dangerously attacked the shell of a brazil nut with a knife. It was the second time I had been severely ghosted in my life: both times, I only realized in retrospect, were provoked by some standoffish or cold obliviousness to the others' sense of my oblivious cruelty or cruel unavailability. And my mother has never used silence as a tactic: this only occurred to me the following day, while on the flight to Tokyo. Backtracking a little–I ruined my previous camera at some point in Trinidad, precisely because of a sticky shutter button which I never managed to fix. The next camera I bought was the more expensive, weather-proof version of the same camera: Fujifilm XT-3 vs XT-30. Taiwan reminds me of Trinidad in spite of the obvious contrasts, simply because it’s the last foreign country I travelled to, and the last place where it rained a lot, and where I enjoyed the overgrowth of foliage on account of a tropical climate. I’ve been thinking about how much I “hate” my mom but with a certain amount of remove from the feelings such a word might invoke. Were she able to make me cry like a child, upset for primordial reasons of hunger and lack, I’d gain a certain sense of love and respect for her. My laptop is the single line of connection I have to my own autonomous life as the contributor to this website. I don’t know why I came up with the image of Taiwanese macaques, as opposed to Taiwanese serow, the other endemic animal for which there’s a close synonym in japan. Saru are more iconic, there are various Youtube videos of them bathing in snowy landscapes in Japan. Macaques suggest to me a colder place than here, though clearly there are macaques in Taiwan and I doubt they live only in high mountain regions. It was enjoyable to see my mother enjoy her mother’s food so much, and to speak in a way that suggested she really is a daughter, and to notice I suppose that my mother’s mother is much more thrifty and peaceful and wise, betraying none of my mother’s impulsiveness or any of the other traits of hers which I find most irritating. The landscape in the dream seemed Californian–it might’ve been the baylands around Palo Alto, where we were around the time of my graduation.
Excursion in a coastal area of Taiwan—overcast, rainy [must be Jiufen]—came across a bunch of white schoolboys in uniforms who were going to go on a goose-shooting expedition; she was told that it was possible to follow along. They were from a prestigious boarding school and she recognized one of them as a younger version of a professor associated with SLE whom she had never taken a course with at Stanford though she had sat in on one of his classes. A friend had once described him as somewhat “evil” in spite of his interest in ethics. Her mother later asked, eagerly, if he was rich, and if he was handsome, but she told her that he wasn’t the proper age, and besides, she wasn’t attracted to him in the slightest. My mother would never ask me if a potential partner was ‘rich.’ Bothered me that she would be interested in my marriage prospects—made me feel like an object of exchange. This dream had something to do with my desire to return to the ‘West’ and also to do with my mother ‘evaluating’ Z—wish that my mother would give me her impression? But not in this way—why would I experience her evaluation in this way?
We were traveling together in a grassland in northern Chile and had arrived at a cabin in the afternoon. I started to repack some pink can-like objects, which was taking some time. After waiting for a while you told me you would move to our next destination first; I would meet you there later. Then I was practicing cello in a converted barn and it was 9 PM. I received a message from you asking when I would be back. I began to pack up the cello with one hand, while reading some of the other messages you had sent in the other. They included four or five short texts punctuated by certain emojis that I liked: dotted-line-face, melting-face. In some of the messages you said something about “mornings” and “stakes”—about being happier to wake up in the mornings: you said was that the stakes for the day were higher and so you were happier. When I looked at the messages again it seemed that they were coming from someone else from high school, but after refreshing the app you showed up as the sender. I suppose the anxiety of wondering if I had been sending my own messages to the wrong person woke me up, and I recorded what I could of the dream in a voice memo at 4:12 AM. The dream left me with a pleasant feeling. After being awake for a short while the pleasant feeling turned into horror: I wondered if the person in the dream was in fact you, or if it had been some false projection created in order to fulfill a wish. I thought of the face of the mystery man from lost highway, with his omniscient smile, and of the scene in which the first man has sex with his wife, slow beads of sweat dripping from his skin, the blank wife as projection screen for his deepest fears. But I needed to relieve myself so I did so and then went back to sleep. Then I had a second dream in which we were still traveling but now in brooklyn. I was talking to the airbnb host, a small serious person with dark hair who I assumed to be non-binary—they remind me of someone from Tanglewood who later desisted or detransitioned, a bassist who is now in a creative writing MFA. I wanted to talk to them about gender roles, but we spoke about dinner plans. As we walked to a restaurant you kept on bumping into me and grasping my hand, and at one point I found that you had an erection. The restaurant was apparently overbooked when we got there, even though it seemed to be completely empty. The airbnb host told us they were going to go out for drinks with a friend instead, and disappeared into some crowd. I said something to the effect of this is the challenge we deal with in america. Later I remember a distinct part of the dream: we are both kneeling on the ground in a featureless dark space. He is almost at arms' length from me, applies pressure to my clitoris until I reach climax: it feels a bit like a wash of blood and gloom even though it is intensely pleasurable.
Rehydrated snails: poured water on some snails in a container to rehydrate them after not giving them any water for an unspecified but long period of time. They were in a container in my bedroom in Olympia, Washington. Most of the snails in the container were small garden snails and were already dead, with holes in their shells, but the two large ones in the center, a Megalobulimus and a Lissachatina, stirred immediately. I think the snail dream had to do with my genitals: rehydrated through orgasm, and wishing for treatment, for being flushed out, in the wake of this mild yeast infection. But why two large snails of different species? Representative of travels (species first encountered in California, then Trinidad, then Brazil, then Taiwan) and of two “types.” Had shown the Megalobulimus to Z once on facebook messenger.
Met Hunter’s family because they were hosting me in California—somewhere in the bay area, but not in San Francisco. I asked his wife if it was the first time she had been in California, which felt like a bad question because I knew they had been there; I also unravelled too many paper towels and rolled them back at the dining table while sitting with them; I was extremely nervous. This seems like a reenactment of Zane’s anxiety in meeting my mom and sister. Neither she nor he looked like themselves and they had two (or three?) children. I’m wondering if they were like the couple on the plane from Tokyo to Taipei that was probably speaking Hebrew. The woman was intensely beautiful, the man handsome but in a way that I found over-virile and unpleasant. He seemed tired of having the children crawling around; the children also seemed very beautiful, with their huge eyes.
Walking through some place in Taiwan with Lara, and it was neutral, pleasant, carefree. Sunny, between skyscrapers. Maybe it was actually Chicago or Seattle. We kept on bumping into people she knew.
Very fleetingly dreamt of Ryohei/Baku from Asako I & II on the plane right after having watched the movie. Something surprising happened.
Walking through some massive dirt mounds and roller-coaster-like structures in Japan. Seems vaguely mecha, apocalyptic. Mom chases me through a residential area with traditional Japanese houses; sister tries to help her catch me, I’m completely absorbed in the act of escape.
Dad drives through New Mexico and I see a diagram of possible places to stop at laid out like a line on a metro map; names include Abiquiú and Ojai. The diagram is rendered in red and old. He tells me we can stop anywhere.
I have sex for the first time with Z in a twilit bedroom with very little color: a little like the bedroom in Drive My Car in which Oto dictates her dreams, or like my room around sunrise when I was with Alec. He puts his penis inside of me, which feels more or less painless and slick, and then withdraws it, and then leaves me hanging: I’m curled up among the blankets sick with desire for his cock, and he remains there kneeling with a cold expression on his face, looking at me. Then I leave to go for a hike in an arid region high in the mountains with orange clay soil, in Taiwan. I come across an orange tarantula with long legs and a small torso—a male tarantula. I attempt to take a photo of it but it jumps onto my back, and then I pace around a bit, wondering how I will manage to swipe it off my back. When I do attempt to remove it, it comes to be held by my hand from the back, with its fangs facing out. When I try to release it, I attempt to throw it forward but it springs back, and remains in my grip. I try to maneuver it into a different position with my right hand, but its top left fang makes contact with my index finger, and then the top right fang touches down, and then the bottom fangs come up, and it clamps down. It hurts, but the fear is more intense than the pain. I wake up and release sweat all at once, like the sob from 12/10. The backside of the clitoris is the gräfenberg spot—
I am at some chamber music (or chamber orchestra) reading where Maurizio Pollini is the conductor. I’m sitting in first cello and for some reason I can’t read the notes; I’m not just reading and failing to execute, but failing to read. I mess up so many times and it’s embarrassing; it means we have to start from the top again, and everyone knows it’s because of me. Eventually I apologize and he looks at me and says, “It’s okay, it’s just not working for you today.” I find this even more humiliating. When I wake up I realize that the theme is from the very fast third movement of the Haydn cello concerto in C Major—a difficult virtuosic piece, but arranged in the dream as a chamber piece with no solo part. My analyst points out that “It’s okay” is something Z has said. “It’s just not working for you today” sounds like it’s about my vagina being too tense for intercourse: the dream is a metaphor of “sexual performance.” Reminded of off-hand comment about how “some people” become preoccupied with their tightness, find a poem from an ex whose second stanza reads: “Pale eyed boy do you have time to talk? / You make me want to push map pins into my eyes / and apologize for hurting.” They also play(ed) the cello, and was in a longish (3 year?) relationship with a lesbian before losing the other kind of virginity to Z? I didn’t find it humiliating but I found it strange, that it hurt, as it was a betrayal of a truth which I had not had time to come to recognize in any other way. The poem is also about not being or no longer not being angry: “not ever spitting out but swallowing instead,” biting the tongue, bile corroding the gut, holding the breath, withholding fire. Observing homologies between M and me hurts but not because it reduces me; it hurts to imagine Z hurt by my observation of homology, of stuckness. But it also feels good to appreciate M’s reality in spite of my previous negative judgments of their writing, which still stand, but remain irrelevant. Been re-reading E’s emails: appreciating the writing and the candor, revindicating past connections, thinking about how they’ve managed to forgive so much.
Danish is attempting to speak Arabic with a guest speaker, and the speaker can’t understand him. He pronounces some words and phrases in different “styles”—he says he’s speaking Arabic with a French accent, and that what matters is “how much dirt you put in it.” He’s doing all this at the Q&A session of a public event, and it produces a strong comedic effect on the audience. Earlier in the dream, I have a more or less substantive set of interactions with M. It feels professional, like I’m interviewing them for a writing project, and we wonder if we’ll pass the Bechdel test.
K emailed me: “I want you” and some other things; a strange description of women he’s been with, regret for not having been more outgoing with me. Keiron appears because he’s one of the few people I’ve dated or had a crush on that my sister considered to be good-looking.
I was manipulating wool in front of my sister; it was carded roving/batting wool, from Ithaca. I don’t think I was spinning it into yarn, just touching and separating it. I think I’m forgetting some important details about this dream.
Mom and rest of family came to my room to point out a mechanical, tower-like firework: a single beam of light moving upwards. I looked at it and turned around to make a comment and my mom was laughing about something with my dad and sister; I yelled “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! YOU DON’T CARE IF I SAW THE FIREWORK OR NOT!” I began to sob upon waking, a few times, but quieted down quickly, afraid of being heard.
Mom pinned me down in bed, twice. I made a low sobbing noise.
Dad made many little drawings of him being calm.
A large stone or blob-like entity with a stick figure atop of each one.
Hunter was telling me many personal details in the session: how he had a background in the natural sciences, in “instructional teaching,” that he ran, that his wife wasn’t that literate and annoyed him sometimes, that she was a lawyer. Earlier I was in Chile, trying to meet up with a group, but I didn’t know where they had said to meet, so I wandered between a little snack bar and a museum-park, and ate two large pink macaron-like cookies.
She was filling out a survey at a reception desk; the receptionist was korean, the survey was on her use of certain korean products. A pudgy boy who had been a singer and composer at Tanglewood, and who now had a successful career, showed up and interrupted; he wanted in his cheerful way to ask a question to the receptionist; it perturbed the dreamer and revealed to her the privacy she required in order to complete the survey.
This dream seems to refer to the mental health survey administered before the examination; the embarrassment around having marked “several times” off on every one of the prompted negativities. Revealing to the unfamiliar doctor that I was in psychoanalysis four times a week. “Four times,” she echoed back, probably without any conscious intent to have done so. The dream allowed for a sort of easy discussion of the provocation of suicide in analysis that morning; something about the difficulty of stabbing oneself.
Sitting on Kanye’s lap and dick; he looks thinner than usual and happy.
Browsing Twitter and see a post in which some early glyphs of fish (no longer in use) had been used: a complex fish → a flatter and simpler fish → the flat uninterrupted contour of an eel. It’s supposed to be a joke, and I find it funny in the dream, though I can’t explain afterwards. There’s also a twitter post involving a ten-frame animation of a drawing of a woman’s face changing, thick black lines. These are supposed to be heirloom posts, primordial posts, famous artefacts of Twitter, recently re-released.
In a room with Zane and (absent) Adele for a conference, either in Chicago or Toyko. There’s a piece of blue meat, a steak labeled “sourdough.” About to prepare it on portable butane stove on the tatami mat, and I ask out loud if my sister will eat a sourdough-flavored steak. We talk about the nice primordial twitter posts in the mean time. There’s a fair amount of laughter, but I don’t think he’s at ease; the humor is diffusing some latent tension.
A urination dream. In a large shared locker room spacious full of light nice tiles curtains in shreds or in strange low places not functioning micturating for a long time while holding curtain over the lower half a blond french boy sits on toilet next to me before the other boy to his left has a chance to sit—I’m micturating for quite a while without any strain and feeling bad about occupying the toilet for so long. Not ashamed of accidental exposure but aware of the necessity of grabbing the curtain and covering myself.
the fish unicode was so beautiful. it seems to reference my sister’s birthday drawing, and maybe it’s funny because there’s a devolution of the “fish” (man) from something ornate into something simple and phallic.
I had to return a bike to a family, and fill something hollow with water, but I don’t remember much, so now I believe the bike frame itself was hollow, though I know the hollow object was black and pebbled and like a vase.
I think this is an attempt to symbolize a sentence from Serge André: “It is the lack of an ‘absence word,’ of a ‘hole word.'” In context: “It is this radical lack on the Other that the girl must confront, and the deficiency somehow doubles feminine castration and makes it into a bottomless lack with regard to masculine castration. It is the lack of an ‘absence word,’ of a ‘hole word.'"
My mother called me; I missed it after having rushed from the dining table to the desk in my room. I woke up from the dream, which occurred during a 20-30 minute nap, and felt aroused in proportion to the anxiety and guilt left over. I masturbated; the peak was long and intense, I fell back into rest.