The six-day-week technique threatens to turn into the Klein Model when I'm not required to eat dinner at a certain time...while sleeping from 5pm-midnight tonight I had the following dream.

It's World War II and a bunch of us are being put into some kind of holding area. The war setting is one of those things you just know in the dream, there isn't actually much evidence of it; no soldiers anywhere, no one being killed, we're all just going into this area. It's semi-outdoors with lots of separate, curvilinear pieces of roof overlapping, all made of different materials, some concrete, some canvas. It's raining, and so in walking around I have to dance a bit to avoid the random drainoff. Everyone else sits around looking sullen. They're mostly people around my age.

Soon it becomes evident that a train is soon going to leave this place, and it's one that everyone wants to be on. I'm one of the last to enter, and when I get to the entrance I see it's got a vending machine-type bill slot where you pay. Before I can do anything a guy sitting in front of the entrance puts in a $20 and pays for me; I thank him and enter. A few seconds later I panic, realizing I've left my jacket out in the holding area we were in. Somehow I decide the jacket is so vitally important that even though the train is about to start moving, I jump off and run to get it (the irony that it was the jacket I own in real life, a German army jacket, escaped me at the time). When I get back the train has indeed left the station, so I start running after it along the tracks. Soon I see two guys on the tracks, appearing to be holding the end of the train while waving me in. But when I get to them, I see it was some kind of illusional joke, and the train is actually way past them. They stop waving and walk away. But then the train does stop and wait for me, and I get on. All in good fun, I suppose.

The interior of the train is a bit like a cubist cafe, with pizzeria-type tables and chairs that are all of different sizes. Lots of people are sitting and standing about, chatting emphatically. I squeeze into the only available chair, which is way to small for anyone.

A while later the train arrives at a zoo and everyone gets off and starts walking through with a guide. Eventually we come to a huge bridge, which is the giraffe area. These giraffes, it should be noted, are about 100 feet tall, as a rough estimate. They're lined up in roped-off areas along the bridge, each with enough room to sit. The zoo guide is talking to us about how they have to be careful when bringing elephants by here. Then we come to a 100-foot tall 7UP bottle, in the shape of a 2-liter bottle. She says "see, we still haven't worked out how to get through here that way. You try to go through here and you'll get a shower of 7UP." Whatever you say, zoo tour guide.

At the end of the zoo tour there is apparently nowhere else to go, at all, so we sit down in a huge atrium that has a view of the giraffe bridge.

I'm with a small posse on a mission: to stop a band from playing. The band is called Freak Monster or something like that, and it's not just that they suck: they are pure evil. If they play it will cause very bad things to happen. They are supposed to play tonight after Saturday Looks Good To Me, a good band who will surely perish at the hands of Freak Monster if we don't act. We have no physical weapons, only our own energy is effective against them.

We are on our way to the venue to prepare our plan, but we know right now we don't have enough energy between us to defeat them. So, in a subway station, we attempt to recruit some people. First we try telling some girls that they should make out with us, because this will increase our energy. Even though this is true (in the dream), we know chances are they will refuse in disgust, which they do. But then somehow, we manage to convince them to come along with us instead, and contribute their own energy. So we take the subway down to some single-digit street and then get out, and go to another train station. It's a station for the 1 train, but in the dream the train is elevated there, and the stop looks more like a real-life bus stop. When we get there, one of the posse's mother is involved in some kind of event with a street food vendor who is set up in a truck right beside the bus stop-looking train stop. The mother has brought many bags of food, and the event is some kind of food collaboration between her and the vendor. We just stand around and watch things happen very quickly, or maybe we eat some food. Someone remarks that a passerby would probably think the mother had "come to borrow some things!" Everyone has a good laugh.

After a while the event ends and we are all waiting at this now deserted train/bus stop, and I suddenly become frustrated that we have been here so long and no number 1 train has come. I say as much to the group, and just as I do a 2 train passes overhead, not stopping of course. I notice that the number 2 in the back window of the train looks as though it has been sloppily drawn by hand with a black marker on a white board, but I don't think much of it. I decide to break off from the group, at least temporarily, and try to find a thrift store, which had been my other goal for the day. I find one on Columbus avenue's 84th street block, which in the dream is somehow near 14th street. The place has a whole lot of magazines scattered around, and a lot of items that don't even look like anything, just strange sculptures. I see a newspaper article taped onto a window inside the front area of the store, and discover that the whole store is a piece of art created by the owner. It discusses the different dominating shapes and so on, a typical art review. I look around a bit more as I read, then decide the store doesn't have much to offer me at this point, since no individual items within it are for sale, and move on. As I exit I see the rest of the posse across the street, and am glad they were able to make the decision to simply walk the rest of the way to the venue, which evidently is near 14th street.

***
So unfortunately I never got to face Freak Monster in the dream, but I am going to see Saturday Looks Good To Me tonight, so who knows what will happen. I was also intending to go to a thrift store today, but I got angry when I looked at a list of them on the web and they seemed to all be way on the east side. So I took a nap instead.

I wrote these just after waking up this morning, so if it seems like I say some things that don't make sense in a matter-of-fact way, that's why. I slept for almost 11 hours and although these dreams weren't particularly psychologically taxing, I felt very mentally fatigued when I woke up.

at summer camp: it is parent's visiting day. Mine are here. It is time for the big softball games. I seem to be part of Lipsky's Lancers. We go sit in the stands, and I remark about how lazy we are, that we're just sitting here chatting. None of the parents seem to have made it to this game. Eventually a counselor shows up, and some people seem to be playing on our field. The counselor starts talking about how the guy in charge of the game next to ours is an asshole. I go over to see what's happening. The guy in charge is pitching. He is standing in the outfield and throws a pitch so hard that it bounces off the backstop, off the ground and then right back to him and hits him in the chest. Unfazed, he picks up the ball and continues. Now he he proceeds to throw a series of pitches standing closer and closer to the batter, and instead of really pitching he is simply dropping the ball in front of the batter. After about three pitches like this the batter manages to hit one, and hits it right into the guy's chest and starts running. I find this whole display hilarious. The guy in charge of that game has looked dead serious, yet completely out of it, during this whole time. I go check out some of the other games (all the fields are adjacent) and they all seem to be pretty normal. Then I go back to chatting on our field.

Later in the games the guy in charge of our game tells me the guy on the other field has been replaced. I go over to see what it's like now, and the whole game is now taking place inside a glass case, something like an ant farm. The new 'guy in charge' is actually a series of tubes that deliver the ball to the batter, who is also inside the tubes. The batter is complaining that the tubes are designed badly and the ball is being delivered in a way that it's impossible to hit it, it never actually gets close enough.

Later there's some ceremony involving the parents, where some of the parents go up and talk about their kids. It takes place at a strange part of camp, a large field that contains models of the world's largest buildings. Among these is a model of several of the main Mormon Church buildings, which I find intriguing. I remember seeing the real things and wondering about how one of them was among the world's largest buildings, since it didn't look that big. Also these buildings look nothing like the real, real things--they are alien domelike things with a purple/pink color scheme. I start to approach these models to see if I can find out more. The models are actually pretty large, and have actual Mormons walking around them. The Mormons have robes with the same color scheme, resembling the Stonecutters from The Simpsons. The buildings have some strange names, like the "doctrine building" and the "building building." As I get closer, the patrolling Mormons start to eye me suspiciously, and I realize this is not a friendly place. They may just be waiting for their chance to grab me and pull me in somewhere and indoctrinate me. So I back off.

The parent ceremony is starting, so I take a seat near the makeshift stage. Pretty soon my parents go up, and my mother says some really embarrassing parent-type stuff about how great I am and such. I should be very embarrassed indeed since the whole camp is there, and I'm aware of that, yet somehow am able to really not care. It's actually not clear whether this occurred before or after the softball games.

at high school:
in the school's library (which doesn't look much like the real thing) I am having a little nap, leaning back in one of the chairs. I start to hear a few girls chattering; I am aware that they are the girlfriends of some guys that I hate, and are trying to get my attention and make fun of me a bit. I ignore them. Their chattering and giggling and taunting grows a bit louder. I stil ignore them. Then one of them comes up and kisses me. I open my eyes to see hers, quite beautiful. Then she draws away. The girls begin talking in a giggling way about how they'd like me to find for them a book, it's some kind of a combination English-Russian Dictionary, and history book about Stalin and the Cambridge spies. I know it well, having recently gotten it from this library, and I now feel strangely compelled to obey their request. Somehow I feel that they are holding me hostage here. So I go looking for it, but cannot find it this time. I spend quite a while looking, but all I can see is a version of the book that's German-Russian instead of English, and some other strange dictionaries. While I'm looking I see some videotape that I want, so I grab it. Finally convinced that the book I'm looking for has been taken out by someone else, I emerge from the shelves and find several of my high school friends sitting on the floor. They greet me. I tell them about how these girls are tormenting me and such, and try to see if they are still in the library by sneaking around various corners. They don't seem to be there anymore. I'm both relieved and disappointed, still wondering at heart why that girl kissed me, and go back to talking with my friends. They laugh off my talk about the girls, it's just another crazy thing I'm involved in. As we leave the library I become aware that it's the end of the semester, and everyone is getting all the books they need. Since I know they don't check out videos at this time, I leave my video on the ground right before the exit. Then I see that the guy in charge of checking things out is so concerned about people's desperation to get their books that he has an airport security-type setup. I worry that he saw me put down the video on his infrared or x-ray camera, but he didn't.

As we are about to leave the school we see something big going on. It's the annual book sale, a treasure trove of valuable and old books, and we had nearly forgot about it. As we go in there is some incredible frenzy going on near the cash registers, and we assume we must have missed the most valuable stuff already. Most of the books sitting on the tables actually look pretty new to me, but I trust my friends that there's good stuff to be had. Someone in our group keeps talking about how they'd like to have some cocktails; apparently that's another part of the book sale tradition. Then we pass one table and my friend Thom starts silently and frantically pointing at a stack of books, actually more like pamphlets made from a rough parchment paper, apparently by a cartoonist named Mark Meiske. It seems he's one of those well-known classic cartoonists like Hirschfeld, and this could be a valuable thing. I have an extremely hard time figuring out the price this is being sold for. First I see $89.83, and think wow, the sellers must be pretty well aware of its value. Then I see something like $3.89 elsewhere on the cover, and then a whole table full of prices like $31.89 and $29.something. I figure out that it is some kind of puzzle, and it says like something like, "if you subtracted the value on the left from the value in the table, you'd have the book's real price." As I'm figuring it out I wake up.

last night: I am attending a solo live show of the comedian David Cross. He is wearing the same yarmulke that he wore and then threw away in frustration on the show "Celebrity Poker Showdown," obviously forming the inspiration for this. I'm with a friend who's acting sulky for some reason. I believe I try various things to cheer them up, but they are unresponsive. Then Cross comes out. It is evident that there will be some kind of audience interaction, and he has cards that each of us filled out on our way in with information about ourselves. He picks mine and starts talking to me. "Let's see, you said you like various guitar players...such as 'the guitar players' [everyone chuckles, apparently this is the name of some hip band in this dream's universe]...and various chord players [everyone chuckles again]." Then the phone wakes me up.

The night before: I had been reading something right before going to sleep that briefly mentioned someone owning a gun purely as protection from bears. This transformed into a dream in which I was in this guy's house, and suddenly he knew there was a bear because some bear droppings came in through a chute next to his door. We ran to get his bear guns, and sure enough the bear came pounding through the front door. The guy shot it with a rifle, and the bear slumped onto the ground. But I was suspicious, it didn't seem like such a weak gun should take it down that quickly. And just as we were starting to relax, the bear leaped back up and started beating us around. It then turned into a very cartoonish fight that kept going back and forth, with the bear beating us senseless, then I throwing a five-pound hand weight at his head, but the guy never managing to get another shot off. It seemed like we should all have been dead or unconscious after a bit of this, but it simply kept going. After a while it began to seem pointless, and that's when the dream ended.

The night before: Vague recollections, but it seems worth mentioning as a rather complex bit of self-reference. In the dream I wrote a blog entry about a dream within the dream that I had had. I don't remember anything about the dream within the dream, or if it even happened in the main dream, but I was very happy with the entry I wrote about it, because having written it right after I woke up, it sounded like the language of a dream, with odd logic and sudden skips. In fact it was close to gibberish, but the fact that I had written it without trying to sound like gibberish was very cool to me.

Two dreams about Cosmo Kramer. The first time I thought I was watching a uniquely dramatic episode of Seinfeld, but by the second one I was pretty sure it was a separate show or movie with him. The first one took place in the subway. The platform was extremely crowded, in fact some people seemed to be camping out there. Kramer suddenly saw the police arresting some guy and tried to help out. There was some kind of serious wound involved. Then the police got some communication on the radio that there was a big problem on a train coming into the station, a guy with a gun. Sure enough the train came in and a guy was standing in one of the doorways holding it open, and firing a gun repeatedly. Kramer managed to evade him but the guy shot at least one person on the platform. Then the dream/episode ended with Kramer somehow helping out and then looking up and seeing the sky through a street grating.

In the second dream Kramer was in the house of some friend or stranger. This man was somehow disturbed or lonely. His house was a cylindrical or maybe a hexagonal room that was extremely tall, perhaps infinitely so. The walls were partly covered with white drawing boards and picture boards on which the man had long been writing a kind of journal or life story, continually going upward. The man was talking to Kramer and telling him to read the boards. Then he said Kramer should go up and keep reading. Kramer said, how? The man made a cryptic commment about using the story. But then Kramer notoiced that there were plates attached to the walls in some places that could be used as rather insubstantial footholds. And so they climbed, the man going ahead of Kramer, and they read the story. The man made a lot of strange and curmudgeonly comments, and Kramer was trying to understand him and his story. They kept climbing and climbing and the story was getting more and more tragic. Then finally the man got to one board and read it aloud, and then let go of the boards and dropped to his death. It was getting very hard for Kramer to climb, but with much effort he managed to reach the board. There was more height in the room, but this seemed somehow to be the end of the story. Kramer read the board. There was a phrase that seemed to ring out, something about "you in your multi-picture board room." It must have been about the man's wife or daughter and the room he built for her. Then Kramer got the point, and he also let go of the boards and dropped.

This week I've developed with newfound regularity the habit of waking up to my alarm, thinking about what I should do (i.e. my morning routine), then falling back asleep and dreaming through the whole routine. This leaves me quite confused when I wake up again. Usually the dreams intersperse the routine with other typical dream material. One night this week, it was a concert featuring conducting by Evgeny Kissen, a famous pianist, and rapping by Speed Levitch. After his performance, Speed came over and talked to me. Since I had last seen him he had grown to a monstrous height, at least seven feet. As he towered over me Speed showed me his collection of hats and visors by pulling them out of nowhere one at a time and putting them on. I was going through my morning routine this whole time.

The next night, I was trying to photograph two goats who were lying next to one another in a cute pose that looked sort of drunken, and they happened to be in front of two giant bottles of some alcoholic beverage. I was using my digital camera. When I tried to press the button, I couldn't find where it was, and when I finally found it, there was a bad noise that definitely did not indicate a picture being taken. Meanwhile one of the goats had taken a giant bottle of alcohol in its mouth and was taking swigs from it, adding to my frustration that the camera wasn't working. Someone nearby suggested that my film was stuck. Somehow this didn't seem like a contradiction, so I opened the back and sure enough I hadn't wound the film forward enough. I did and closed it back up. Of course the goats had gone away.

* * *

Today was one of those days that makes one feel as if comments about how strange and wacky things are in other countries are quite meaningless, because often things just as strange are found here. It was "employee appreciation day' for the hospital, which meant a special free lunch for us. But apparently employees need something more than just that to feel appreciated, because they had hired people to make it a theme party, the theme decidedly being a mix of about 70 percent 1960s and 30 percent 1970s. There were people dressed up as Austin Powers and a Fembot, lots of "groovy" wall hangings and furniture, lava lamps, and a DJ playing disco music. The Austin Powers guy had some serious work to do on his accent, but he had the mannerisms down. The Fembot assaulted us with psychedelically colored handkerchiefs, and berated us for not having breastpockets to put them in. Inside there was a lot of shouting to keep moving through the food line. Then in the middle of that a guy walked up to one of my coworkers and presented him with a survey about whether or not he liked the party's "Seventies theme" and how appreciated he felt. On the way out I was again accosted by the Fembot, who was actually at least 55 years old, and told to put my crazy handkerchief around my head. Well I sure feel appreciated.

Walking with several acquaintances on the upper west side, we suddenly have the idea of a team walking race to somewhere downtown. Then by some twist of conversation this turns into an art contest, in which each team (we divide the group into 2) must build dioramas of our 6 favorite features of Central Park, and we will then judge the team that produced the best quality models. I have no idea how we're going to do this in one day, but who am I to rain on the collective parade, and so off we go to wander the park picking out our 6 favorite things.

The features of the park I had thought I remembered fondly seemed suddenly absent, but there were many new things that we saw on our slightly hurried walk: statues of Archimedes and many others, a giant stone disc. I was scrambling to write each one in a notebook for consideration for our collection. We came to a nature museum with an open glass helical construction. Coming into it through a ramp a few stories up, we saw many 3-D models of different animals, with different kingdoms on each floor. One of my teammates remarked of a flounder model or some other fish that it was one of her favorites and should be one of our dioramas, but I scoffed, saying it was just one of hundreds of animal models in this museum and really nothing special. Then my teammates went walking away while I examined something and I lost track of them. Oh great, I thought, how are we ever going to get this done now? I left the museum on the bottom floor and noticed that at this entrance they were demanding a lot of identification for entry, as if people were trying to get on an airplane or obtain a driver license. I thought about informing them that this was rather pointless because we had been able to get in through the ramp without going through any security, but, I didn't want to rock the boat.

Wandering some more, I came to a very strange place that looked like an ancient hanging garden with lots of high stone walls covered with carvings and moss. A voice spoke of one of the great treasures of the Park, a great majestic animal: the flamingo. And sure enough, that's when I saw one. Walking some more, I came to an outlook over a huge open area containing what appeared to be extremely deep, swampy pools of water. In each pool there were a couple of giant flamingos standing upright with their feet on the bottom. They had to be about 30 to 40 feet tall, although it was difficult to tell the depth of the water. The giant ones would wade/stomp through the pool menacingly, then plunge their heads down to the bottom, where several tiny one or two-foot tall babies were sitting, apparently able to breathe. They would scurry out of the way every time the giants came down on them. I wondered if my memory of normal flamingo size had been so wrong, then spotted some that fit that description in another, much more shallow pool. They also seemed quite edgy and prone to chases. Well I had certainly found one of our dioramas. I pulled out my notebook to make some sketches. Just then I heard a distant rumbling, and looking behind me, realized my terrible mistake. Coming down the narrow path whence I had arrived was a pack of angry flamingos (the normal-sized kind) at full speed, with pink feathers flying and a terrible collective noise. How could I have been so foolish as to think they would not observe my presence? No time to consider that now, for all I can do is run. Around a corner, into a tunnel. Light ahead, but they are gaining fast, literally nipping at my heels. And then--

A while ago I read a technique for achieving something--hallucinating, meditating, lucid dreams, some crap like that. It was to slowly count backward from 100 while imagining oneself falling through the air. I think the book cautioned against using this just to fall asleep, but for me that was about all it did. Lately I've had increasingly frequent nights of lying awake for hours with every conceivable thought racing through my head, which surpisingly enough can really drive you insane after a while. I tried concentrating on my breathing, but the fact is breathing just isn't enough to concentrate on, at least not for me. There are pauses between breaths, and in those moments other thoughts deviously sneak in. I also had a tendency to breathe very deeply, causing my heart to start pounding, which is not at all conducive to sleep. The counting technique must have gotten into that stream of thoughts because I decided to give it another try. I decided this time on a policy of one number per breath, as it otherwise becomes distracting trying to maintain a consistent pace. After one night I also dispensed with the "falling" stuff, because it's just silly and unnecessary. I always ended up just counting, and then every few numbers, saying to myself "oh right, and I'm falling too! fall fall fall...count count cou-fall! count..." and so on.

Some interesting things happen while doing this. Thoughts still sneak in, but in this relatively controlled environment, in which they are purely unintentional and not part of any real or useful train, it's possible to almost watch them pop up and then wonder about why they occurred. Since all I'm supposed to be thinking about is breathing and counting, must all these thoughts have some connection to one of those that causes them to come about? Some of them are as strange and sudden as dreams, and seem like they couldn't be anything but random synapse firings that come together in some bizarre way and then fade out. An example would be great here but so far I've never remembered any of them long enough to document them without disturbing the process.

Another phenomenon I've observed is that I seem to lose feeling in parts of my body, but not in the manner of true numbness, with the tingling and all. For example, I realize that I can no longer tell whether my mouth is closed, or my feet are touching. This always happens at a moment in the process when I achieve a profound stillness, in contrast to my usual tossing and turning, that only seems possible when distracting myself from physical sensations through some technique like this. Sometimes I'll give in and move a bit to instantly get the feeling back, and when I do this, I suddenly feel as though before I had been trying to feel it in the wrong place (if that makes any sense).

What one usually realizes after doing anything like this for a while is that it isn't so much this technique that works so well, it's just something new, anything different, and it wears out after a while. Tossing and turning is the same effect on a smaller time scale. The first few nights I fell asleep either before finishing the count or just about at its end (I could never remember whether I had stopped at 1 or 0). After that I had one night when I failed to fall asleep after completing the count. That prompted me to try another procedure, in which I count back and forth from 10 to 100 in increments of 10, just going on and on until I conk out. (Don't ask me why the 10's and 100 rather than 1's and 10, I think it's just a good feeling to reach 100 for some reason, probably all those years of schooling). The infinity is nice, since I don't have to worry about what I'm going to do when I finish, but it also seems to bring me closer to a point where I'm giving myself a virtual lobotomy just to avoid the insanity of overwhelming thought.

This week a confluence of events, including the relentless cloudy weather, have left me without a quick way to tell what time it is when I wake up. This morning things came to a head with this series of thoughts:

-I think, I've woken up early (for me, this means before 10am).

-I think, my previous thought was in a dream, and it's actually 1pm!

-I actually wake up for the first time, realize both of the previous thoughts were in dreams, am relieved that it's not 1pm, then fall back asleep without checking what time it really is.

-I think, oh no, after going back to sleep I slept for a long time and now it really is late.

-I wake up again, note the previous thought was in a dream again, but that it still could be late, realize this is getting ridiculous, finally pull out my laptop and wake it from its own slumber. It's 9:47.