transcription of dream after reading Ginseberg's Indian Journals

4-9-2010

6:36am

dream of a game show, where contestants must endure being killed time and again. each round is a new death, a new torture, a new unspeakable demise. i am on this show.

some scenes:

1) threats of sodomy from a hulking host;

2) a giant pond, relatively safe, where the horrors of Vietnam play out on the shores and one must stay in the water;

3) a madman who has us line up in a row (there are dozens of us) so he can drill into our temples and fill our skulls with peroxide;

4) a round where each of us must pour a bottle of water into a vat where a fellow contestant sits. each bottle is another step towards his demise, and i pour mine without hesitation. once full, the host - there is a different host for each round - screws on a lid. i wait, watching with the others, hoping the person is dead;

5) final scene is only me and a host. he puts a drill to the center of my forehead and i lean into it, hoping to end it sooner. the drill merely glances of the skin, however.

between each death, the rounds begin as some sort of mystery or maze, and in these moments there is hope. the main horror is not the dying, but the fear of dying, which never recedes after dozens of rounds.