Pages: Dream Year 1975; or: the solipsist’s headparty (as a text)

Regular readers of this blog – both of you – will have noticed that I have posted entries from a raw dream diary that I kept during 1975, fifty years ago, and I’ve posted them on the 50^th anniversary of their entries (at 3.00 in the morning, British sleepy-dream time). I offered an explanation of the project before I posted it. Although I say ‘explanation’, I wasn’t really sure why I’d make such a thing public. It seemed somehow a counterpart of my 2019 posting of my 1969 diary (daytime diary!), but it wasn’t, because the mood is different, and different from my daytime 1975 diary and journal (I switched from one mode to the other in September). Last December, introducing the ‘project’, I quote from a note at the end of the diary: ‘in which i will record my dreams … possibly (but not necessarily) for use in literary form later’. Some dream fragments were used at the time (on the tape collage of 1983 issue 2, for example, which is currently being digitalised). I mused in December: ‘It is just possible that “later” has finally arrived!’ It was probably a flippant remark, but in July, when I was halfway through the process (though the entries were all scheduled in advance, a marvel of blog technology), I started boldly to abut the entries against one another, sections for each month, paragraphs for each entry. I then worked on it, deleting the odd entry, not to make narrative, exactly, but not to defy it either. In my own words then: ‘I have polished up its rough recording, particularly where (oddly one might think after half a century) I remember the dream itself.’ I have resisted pure invention, but revised its notational qualities (I was scribbling in haste, half asleep!). For example, the entry ‘Grannie is here’ becomes ‘Grannie, who has no television at home, is here at Oakapple Road in Southwick’, because context was originally assumed and needs providing. This passage continues: ‘She says she “doesn’t mind watching intelligent stuff”, though she’d rather watch “the funny coloured man on the other side”’. This could be a distinction between the more intellectual BBC and the entertaining ITV, but I can’t be sure, as that would enter the realm of interpretation. I have left ‘coloured man’ in as it is what I dreamt, and it probably reflects current parlance; some other derogatory terms have been replaced. I have intensified my practice of disguising names, where I haven’t in the writings which have become its probable resting-place, amongst my un-writings that I call ‘autrebiographies’ (a term I stole from JM Coetzee), published so far as Words Out Of Time. I say in my note ‘It is a natural autrebiography,’ meaning that dreams ‘other’ one’s life. I don’t know whether I shall collect this piece, or not, but I can’t imagine publishing it in a magazine or journal first, because the ‘diary’ version of it is already on this blog in its divided entirety, so it seems apposite to post it all here, now the anniversary year is over.

Dream Year 1975; or: the solipsist’s headparty

Chris and I are in a dark graveyard. I lie on a grave with four names from four different periods embossed upon its stone. Chris remains standing. A group of girls – including two black girls on swings – appear; it is an art lesson. I talk. I am attracted to one of them, a white girl, standing behind me. Then Mr G., head of Sixth Form, pushes an ancient figure in a wheelchair through the crowd. I’m alone on a bus, going up Overhill. Somebody says, ‘Ezra Pound is rubbish.’

I’m holding a baby: Aunt Marjorie laughs.

Facing two doors. David (or Chris) goes to one. It opens. A prostitute appears. Chris (or David) asks for a cup of coffee. The woman laughs. He goes in. I knock on the other door. Another prostitute appears. I go in. I do not want a cup of coffee.

I’m in a Victorian waiting room, vestibule, waiting for my room upstairs. Norwich Hell’s Angels, Satan’s Slaves, are out there in the lift or on the stairs. Out in the garden, I see Oli Findon, the gardener, in shorts, working at an incredible pace. I wait again for the lift, but in a smaller, different room. I look in the reflective glass and see two reflections of myself.

Walking through the brothel area of town, I see a man under a bus shelter with an erect penis; it’s hard, looks hairy. Nearing, I see it is covered in tobacco shag. There are lots of gays teeming about. Somewhere ‘ten little black children’, as someone calls them, sing praises to the Union Jack.

I follow a female dressed completely in white to my university room (like a figure in a poem I know I’ve written). I can’t climb as fast as she can. She shouts back to me. We’re at a small railway crossing. I get caught by the gates, but she doesn’t. She lobs me a coat and goes her separate way. I walk off alone to my university block. Everything becomes vague, though David and Paulus are somewhere about, I think.

Grannie, who has no television at home, is here at Oakapple Road in Southwick. We say we want to watch a programme on the TV. She says she ‘doesn’t mind watching intelligent stuff’, though she’d rather watch ‘the funny coloured man on the other side’. I go along a dark path to avoid having to do the washing up. I reach a crossroads. Forward, the road continues, but I turn right. I see a mud path running through woods leading up a steep path to the top of the hill. I know it could be half a mile high.

I fight for the Anglo-Saxons against the Normans. Down a ditch – there’s an image of ‘me’ in the ditch with the two armies on either bank. I have to get back without getting killed. I’m off, having lit a fire, disappearing under cover of its smoke.

I talk to Maggie in a pub. I’m getting angry (like I do) at her for smoking, but I’m raging about acts of political torture abroad.

Southwick publicans Julian and his wife talk about ghosts. She goes white. ‘What, upstairs?’ she asks. ‘Yes,’ says Julian, adding quickly that it’s not at the Pilot, but at their brewery’s training house for managers. Which is Grandma Sheppard’s old house in Melrose Avenue, Portslade.

Simon is in a wheelchair. He still runs but feels numbness in his body. He’s been a terminal cancer patient for years. I pity him. I watch him meeting another like himself.

I wake up with the name ‘MILTON’ on my lips.

I lean forward to kiss Trudy, but she tries to put me off, though finally succumbs.

Somebody tells me I’m going bald. Dad nearly catches me looking at dirty magazines.

Turning, in some sort of queue, I recognise Conrad, who is balding. Then we’re on the beach with Conrad’s friend. They say Josie will be coming. I rush away to catch a train.

Bruce Forsyth or Tony is going to be put in jail for a long time, I hear. My girlfriend sets off to buy sensual underwear. I’m climbing a ladder to get across the railway crossing; a boy at the top topples it. I yell, and wake up.

Tony and I look through pictures in the news reports of Student Power of 3A, from 1969.

My mother is to be hanged. (Hawthorne, I’m thinking.) I drive around in a car with Dad. She’s in an estate of ruined houses, worn smooth like Yves Tanguy objects. An estate of dead houses with dead sky above.

David, an unidentified girl, and I walk down by a rough seashore. He disappears. She does too. David has subtly left me to my masturbation. There is a tower nearby. Water sprays down from it. Suddenly a strange wave approaches, bursts on the top of the tower. It crashes through the tower to the ground as fire. I think David is inside.

David is on the phone with his mother, trying to phone his father. When he gets through, he talks – but I ring the phone off abruptly. I apologise. He accepts my excuse that it was an accident, though it wasn’t. They then forget the phone number because his father changes his job so often, so they can’t try again. An exterior scene of the Southwick Square launderette.

Lennon, the Socialist Worker Party man next door, N40, student block Norwich, smiles, and I talk to him. I’m selling goods door to door.

I’m told off by Chris for not writing to him.

Dopedream: at home, reading the newspaper. There’s a picture of a ‘20 year old beauty student’ (she is good looking!) with a shot in her hand, posing at a London football ground with Battersea Power Station in the background. (Perhaps the Tower of London is just visible too.) She is this country’s entry for putting the shot. ‘Millwall aren’t going to be too pleased!’ the article quotes somebody’s comment. Another report in the paper says that sometime soon Professor Bigsbogsbrain will be teaching in Germany for a while and will be paid x francs and y marks. As nobody knows what the exchange rate will be by then, nobody writing knows what he’ll be paid!

There are two ‘me’s. As in ‘William Wilson’ by Edgar Allen Poe, I think, even as it happens. Lee Harwood admonishes me.

Mum and Dad come to visit me at the University of East Anglia. Dad (walking with a stick) announces: ‘Went to a dance the other day. Everybody was such a good dancer, and the professor made a good speech!’ (We’re walking through a downland track.) ‘You’d better teach them Chase Charlie!’ he says, running off at speed. Climbing the steps, I shimmy up the walls. I get Dad to remove an old mug and cup from the coal bunker (an indoor one, like in certain council flats). I’m looking at the attic hatch, fearfully.

Phillipa sexually assaults me against a wall in a crowded room.

We’re holding a recording session in the front room. Ted is there, along with Chris and his cretinous friends. The UEA residencies are suddenly in Joe’s back garden, next door in Southwick.

I let a black woman, with identical red lips and c**t, suck me off.

I’m in a room, like a railway carriage, with one other person, somebody in the next room, dying. We struggle outside to get something, but the outside of the building looks like a cross between Gormenghast and the Arts Block. We can’t find our way back.

Stéphane Grappelli plays Nuages on guitar, mainly barring the fretboard with one finger. Several times I tell Mum about my (real) head wound. Everything is confusing.

I invite Howard back to my university room for coffee after a rock concert, but he has to pick up his own coffee cup from his room beforehand. I work out how to pronounce ‘Buñuel’, though I know it’s spelt ‘Bruñel’.

The bare fields of Thundersbarrow Hill on the Downs are peppered with white objects (like burnt trees, I think) across the dead earth. It has something to do with chemicals, possibly contamination.

Talking to Grandad halfway down Kingston Lane, Shoreham, it’s the end. He’s going to Hospital to die. He’s nervous, and talks of Ezra Pound. Grannie calls. He runs off, nearly falls, but is caught by somebody, who says, ‘Thank God he’s gone!’ I object fiercely, indignant. He’s the only grandfather I’ve got. Then: there’s a prize-giving at our old school. I have journeyed home from UEA especially for it. We aren’t allowed to take photos during the ‘pineapple part’ at the end, though we had been before, and did. David is there. Then: later in David’s room, there’s a huge hand-drawn picture of water where the Dali poster usually hangs. David throws a dart at Simon. It lodges in Simon’s hair. ‘That’s not funny!’ David laughs. I’m shocked, but I say, ‘I thought it was!’ ‘You would!’ complains Simon.

I leave a house – somebody calls out that Chris has seen Maggie, and that she’s very brown. Affronted that she hasn’t phoned yet, I say, ‘I s’pose she’s been spending all her fucking time doing fucking nothing!’ When I return home, Mum ushers me into the living room. Dad is talking to Maggie. Suddenly we’re all in the hall. There’s a child there. ‘What’s that?’ I say. ‘That’s a child of C.P. Snow or Xwenpj Ulubaba. I’ve sort of adopted it.’ Mum mocks me: ‘You won’t have to teach it to read!’ It is an insipid object. I want to get Maggie upstairs.

I’m at the top of Hill Farm Way and Oakapple Road, a copy of The Sun in my hand. All the reports in it are about dancing. Requel Welch must be older than 21, I think, responding to one piece. Tea and biscuits on a tray will be ready soon, I know. A vision of 15 Oakapple from the exterior.

A priest in a village in the Seventeenth Century. You can tell Norwich by its owl, I realise, painted on the door of the old barn dedicated to medical supplies. I go over to look at the old altar. Why do people like to see this old decade and not the living church? I think. I’m on the long Norwich express train. The Mafia are plotting somewhere on board: they realise that the driver can’t leave his seat, even at a halt. This is the best time to smuggle dope in or out. Later I’m looking for a lavatory on the train. Its interior is like a Jumbo Jet’s: people going for baths, even. There are wide winding staircases between levels. Later still, I’m at a bar, holding up a drunk. Even later, he pursues me along a road in a car. I promise him I won’t tell her, whoever she is. A piece of cotton dangles from the car.

Picasso, an old, balding man, is welding gold bars into works of art, miraculously. He makes me an amulet. He signs his name and writes something on a piece of paper. The doctor says there’s no hope; Picasso is dying. But I’ve still got my amulet! I think.

Chris and I share a room. A whole load of friends and acquaintances from UEA arrives for our party. Lennon has gone bald, but argues politics amicably. We leave. We’re on a yacht but suddenly remember our party and rush back along the riverbank in different directions. Chris finds it and returns. Everything is okay, he reports. Later, by the swimming pool on the yacht, I stand naked with a girl wearing just bikini bottoms. I pull them off and we both jump in!

I’m being shown round a public school. I realise ETON could also be spelt EATEN. There are Inca Indians waiting in the interior of the Rococo building, a threat of ritual. The new queen leads out the old queen from behind, her hands on the old queen’s breasts, into the room where she will die. (They’re like figures in a poem I know I’ve written.) She is still beautiful.

Maggie is haunted, stalked, by Silvester. She comes to me for protection from him. I’m sad though. C.B. Cox is dead. It’s sad. I know it’s probably not the literary critic and Black Papers author, but a UEA student of the same name, who styles his initials in the exact same way.

The Poet of the Rood or Rood the Poet? I know it’s something to do with W.B. Yeats.

At the big party along Croft Avenue, Southwick, Tony is very drunk. I’ve just got back from seeing Lee Harwood. Tony says, ‘Listen.’ I do. ‘It’s Duck’s Deluxe,’ he says, somehow spelling it like that, saying it like that, as we listen to the music. The party is mainly in Dick’s front garden, a few doors down. The guests gather around a table in the garden, wearing suits. Gatecrashers aren’t, and are conspicuous and ill at ease. Joannie, my first girlfriend. is there. I talk to her, until I’m eventually walking round with my arm around her. Some people laugh at us. I try to free myself.

I spot Ian Twickenham, the Eco Party SU leader at UEA and his political cadre picnicking in Church Lane, Southwick, literally in the middle of the road. I stop to talk for a while. I tell them that I live here.

There’s a big party up King’s Road opposite a house that looks like Rita’s. There is a large bus parked outside. I have a loveable little black woman with me. There’s a sense of immanently travelling on the bus. Flashforward: I’m crossing a river, where the railway level crossing is by Portslade Station, in search of her.

There are many small huts that resemble the houseboats on Shoreham beach. Frank lives in one. I am a stranger to this countryside. Everybody is writing poems to Grandad. We go to a pub. A rock group starts up. They play the Rolling Stones’ ‘Angie’. The music suddenly stops like a record being taken off, and then starts again (like a needle descending at random). Tony laughs at the flat singing, wide gaps between his teeth. Frank, indeed all of us, are known for having dope on us. Dave and Frank (two UEA poets) carry a gigantic cannabis leaf each. A girl comes past as we head along the road back to Horsham university residences in Norwich, to my room. She says, ‘You’ll drop in on Grandpa, won’t you?’ I know he won’t like me like this. I have visions of bars – but somehow I get myself home.

Vic Sage is giving a lecture in a large hall. Mr Parrott, the art teacher from school, comes in saying, ‘Sorry Vic. It’s an official strike.’ The girls want to take off their bras in protest, but they are all flat-chested. Somebody talks about writing university essays in an original style.

Davros from Dr Who is transforming David into a moron, and he’s a willing partner. The operatives fix a device (like a jeweller’s eyepiece) to his glasses.

D. is looking through some ‘Tea-cards’. They explain dreams. Dad doesn’t like part of what’s said and blocks his ears and begins to hum, probably the tune to ‘These Foolish Things’ (as in Soft Machine’s quotation from it). I try to stop him, telling him, ‘Dreams and reality have to work in harmony!’

Four of us – Frank, Elaine, me and a fictional Polynesian mixed-race person – are looking for Derek Mahon. I keep trying to make it with Elaine to no avail. Mahon, we discover, is out, visiting William Blake. We calculate Blake would be 214 years old, but we know it’s just humanly possible, and we know that nobody wheels him about in a wheelchair. I kiss Elaine by a wall.

I return to 15 Oakapple Road after having been at Tony’s in Croft Avenue for a time. Louis is here instead of John and we’re in my old bedroom, the small room I had as a very small child. Louis taps on the window, despite the fact we don’t want to wake Mum and Dad. He quotes King Lear. He feels an evil sensation, he says. I get it too and run out of the room screaming. There’s a foetus in the cupboard! I think Mum and Dad are in my present room now and Mum is screaming horribly. I rush in, crying, ‘Mummy!’ She screams like in orgasm or childbirth. Or death. Dad is still asleep somehow. I go to her. Her eyes open. ‘Mummy, I’ve come home,’ I say. (Comic interlude: Tony has a deodorant, some perfume, and pretends to roll it over his clothes onto his neck, moving lower, uttering ‘Ah darling!’, imaginary words for a lover kissing him. He moves the bottle lower until he reaches his genitals. Theatrical noise of suckings-off, though I wonder how Tony knows what it sounds like, a joke I don’t say.) Mum tells me to eat a big dinner since I haven’t been eating. Several of us are on a cycling holiday. We stay in a weird mansion – very aristocratic, a classic great house. One servant tells us, ‘They’re mad. They don’t leave us alone.’ I’ve got a room of my own. But with others. Big Baby Calibans roam the grounds.

I’m walking along a road, reach its corner, a church on one side, and David’s house on the other. I advance towards a door. Music from the church starts up. I experience a religiose feeling, wondering at the coincidence. All David’s family are dressed in rags and refuse to acknowledge David, who wears rimless square glasses; moles cover his face. I try to get in his house. I’m with some limp lady, trying to fuck her. Through the glass in the wall, not quite a window, I still see David’s family. I close the curtains. I move back towards the joys of her underwear, as I think it, but people keep walking in to butter bread. I am increasingly annoyed. No, it is poets they bring in to butter, Tennyson for one.

I attend a Vic Sage seminar. I say I can’t reconcile the fact that Eliot wrote both ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ and Four Quartets.

On the bus to Horsham, Norwich, I see Deirdre Burton, the concrete poet, getting on. She goes up to the top deck. I’m trapped on the lower deck by something or somebody I don’t like. Finally, when I do get up, to alight the bus, Bob Cobbing finishes performing, the end of a sound poem like the ‘e’ tape piece with Peter Finch. This is my stop. I fly across Horsham field on an umbrella. When I finally touch ground, Nora stands on a raised platform, like a stage, above me, with friends, crying, ‘I’m worried, I’m worried,’ over and over again.

Tony and I lock Eric Mosrite, our imaginary co-director of Supranormal Cassettes, in a room with a live horse, and forget him. He eats part of the horse! We see bones sticking out from the cadaver.

The milkman calls at Tony’s. We all hide in the front room because we haven’t got any money. The milkman stares through the window, spots us. Tony’s mother goes to the window. ‘Let me frighten him!’ She talks to another man in the garden. ‘I’ll be out tonight.’

Maggie is to be executed for murder. I offer to be her defence.

I see the stone on the bust in Dali’s painting, ‘The Triangular Hour’. It has fallen off!

We’re in a restaurant, Tony in the background. Somebody shows me an LP with ‘…restaurant…’ written on the cover. It’s by Soft Machine. Mary is there. We kiss. She moves her tongue violently in my mouth.

Sitting in Micheal’s car at the bottom of Overhill, Michael, Trevor K and I. Suddenly there’s a police Land Rover behind us and we chant in unison, ‘We’ve been caught!’ A car in front of us tears off. Some of the police follow it. We drive off fast and give the rest the slip, round by the flats, in Whitelot Close. Then I see a policeman in a window looking out at us. We’re on bikes. I think we get home.

I’m working behind the bar in The Pilot. Julian says something nasty about his female temporary staff. Some women object and I wish to join in their complaint.

On a British Rail (Sealink cross Channel) ferry. All of UEA’s students are crossing over at least one day a week. I see neither Colin nor Howard though. I think I travel twice. I point out to Maggie: Mr Arden, our history teacher from school, and his four children, one of them very ugly. I see Gus, the maths teacher, carrying a huge plate of food. I fear he’ll puke it up on the rocky crossing. I rest with David at a table, drinking coffee. Two people are playing cards to our left. Suddenly a girl’s head pops in between David and me. Then she sits with us. David disappears. She is an unhappy German student, who can’t speak good English. I fancy her. Then an old woman comes and sits beside her. ‘Can you show me where the Guard’s Room is?’ I know she’ll not understand, so I shout ‘Oye!’ and point to the door. She leaves, but so does the German girl. When David returns, ‘She’s gone,’ I say, forlorn.

Joseph the barman from the King and Queen in Brighton has been arrested for murder.

Tony and I take acid on a sugar cube and walk around Southwick Square. I say that I think it’s going to take a long time to work. I’m worried about the effect, because I have to go home for tea at my parents’. We go to a party. There are various people there, including Jimi Hendrix. I think it’s very appropriate he should be there for my first trip. I say to Tony, ‘How can I go home tripped up?’ and a man with glasses – a veritable straight – says, ‘What did you say?’ ‘Tripped up – that means I’m drunk.’ I’ve been found out, and I know it.

A spooky version of David’s Grannie, who lives in a dilapidated house, a ‘dump’ we’d call it, has to die. She has two dogs – one big, one small – that I try to avoid. David’s father sits there in silence.

I’m reading a book and watching a film of it at the same time. It’s a D.H. Lawrence book-film and Trevor Howard is in it. A big-breasted pregnant, lecturer, Doris McNabb, is pointed out to me by her husband.

I walk with Trudy along Brighton seafront. I know she’s still going out with Anton. That doesn’t matter. We hold hands. I bend her backwards over the promenade railing. As we are kissing, a cricketer passes and makes a dirty remark. I say, ‘Go play your stupid game with my father!’

MM calls but I’m assured it’s not ‘homosexual business’. Three of us are waiting, drinking wine, putting dope in it. A man is watching us. He leaves. I leave too: I think he’s going to the Law. I too pass along the side of Victorian tenements. The other two follow me closely. We are waiting for Maggie to give birth.

Tony arrives carrying a heavy pack on his back as he passes through the doorway. ‘Let the black man go through first,’ I say to him. There’s a big battle brewing.

The ultimate ecstasy turns out to be a giant soundless wave a mile high, which sweeps over me and breaks upon me and carries me with it. The ultimate ecstasy.

I’m standing on the seashore with Persephone Holst, but I dream of the UEA girl Fiona from Brighton.

I’m sitting with David, our arms around one another. We’re very embarrassed, trying to disentangle and get away from each other.

I stand behind the bar at the Crown and Anchor in Shoreham, with the gay barman. An old man comes in and asks me, ‘These daytrips,’ – he means the Sealink ones I’m promoting as my summer job – ‘do they go from Littlehampton?’ He has a brochure entitled ‘Salisbury’. He shuffles some money and says, ‘How many tickets can you give me for 50p?’ ‘There’s a reduction for G.L.s’ the barman says. ‘O.A.P.s if you don’t mind,’ the old man corrects him indignantly.

Tony tells me how to operate a TV (it’s from the 1940s, but in colour). Image: screen marked ‘very bright coloured picture’, knob to the right: ‘tuner’. The main knob is marked ‘main knob’.

Mother comes in and embarrasses me in front of my friends. ‘I remember when you were so high.’ Unfortunately, Persephone is one of them.

I’m arguing about Alan Ainsworth of Soft Machine with Tony. (I think I know I mean Alan Holdsworth, of course.)

We’re all at 15 Oakapple Road with Mother and Grannie. Suddenly, Great Aunt Gina appears and we’re all walking down the road with Gina and Aunt Olive. Both of them were born in 1885, and therefore they like D.H. Lawrence.

I’m with Aunt Marjorie, taking Geraldine to the optician. Her eyes are very bad, we’re told. Geraldine turns into Trudy and I rip off her blouse. She says, unperturbed, ‘Everybody’s at university, except Paulus.’ I turn. Paulus is there. I get up and Trevor K and Terry are there too. Then I see Micheal with a new haircut and feel embarrassed about not getting in touch with him before now, since I’ve been back from university for a while.

I dance with a girl at a disco. She increases in size until she’s very fat. In the morning, we’re all still there, exhausted, sitting down with the boys. The girls – not exhausted at all – rush out.

I’m in a large room with a girl, probably Elaine, whose birthday it is as well. We’re in an impossibly capacious house in Oakapple Road. I think we dance. Guests arrive. Tim is squirming, oddly, on the floor, possibly drunk. ‘It’s that guy’s birthday tomorrow,’ I say. I think of David and Simon.

I’m at some kind of convention. I walk into the room, but it’s also the low fence along Middle Road, Southwick. A woman comes on stage to announce the next singer, but she starts singing herself, rather hoarsely. Far away, off in the back, a man plays a gentle accompaniment. They play for a while. It’s pathetic. John and Mick have come up to Norwich with me. They see many such moments of frivolity. I go to the lavatory and hanging there are the legs and torso of a plastic model which talks to me about escaping from Russia.

I recognise we’re in Eastbourne, Maggie and I, and we start to walk home. We go into Marks and Spencers. The man behind the counter asks Maggie about her menstruation. She says, ‘My horns are all right!’ We ask a local for directions to the station. ‘There’s Peacehaven over there, but they never do any work. Try Newhaven.’ In the shop, there are many nude women with pubic hair and big penises. I know I’m dreaming in my dream. I want to tell Josie about it.

Howard and I at a dance in a large hall. The thugs who tried to beat us up months ago are there. Howard meets one and kisses him. ‘Bloody queers! Queer-bashing!’ ‘There’s nothing wrong with being queer,’ I cry. ‘Another one!’ We run from them, as we did from them before, in reality.

Maggie and I lie in separate single beds. I draw them together and we’re one.

People run around in rings in opposite directions, perhaps even flying through the air. Trevor K and Roger Daltry and the rest of The Who are there, with music from Litzomania in the background. I say to Daltry, nodding at Trevor K, my old joke: ‘Watch out for him, he’s ugly!’ Image of bald heads.

Maggie and I sit on a sofa in a crowded room. She leans back and my arm gets trapped around her. She asks, ‘Was that intentional?’ ‘No; it happened automatically, by accident.’ I leave her to find Howard. I exit the confusing building via the cellar bar. I have to crawl along a narrow tube. I greet the manager, ‘Good evening. I’ll have to find the other way out for Maggie.’ I race back to find her, so we can leave. We come out of a public lavatory together. I open the door. MM is there. ‘A bender!’ I scream, closing the door. I try to lock him out, but he’s locked me in! I make a run for it, or try to. Howard goes round the loos with him and I return to Maggie. Walking under a walkway as at UEA famously, I see the ‘other’ Howard from Barrow. ‘Baaa!’ I say, but he doesn’t laugh, doesn’t respond to my silly sheep joke, and I pass on. He’s sulking with his girlfriend from Keswick teacher training college in Norwich. When I get back to Maggie, she’s talking to Silvester. I join in, voluble. He’s embarrassed, which suits me after the complications of the evening.

Dave (of Frank and Dave, UEA poets), for no reason I can discern, says that he’d put the handle of his ping pong bat, which was ‘very long’, up Judith’s c**t.

In a shop. I buy some fruit and then I purchase a couple of books, which I think are about study, but they aren’t. I choose another one, which is, but I don’t want it now.

A man says of Frank Zappa, like a voice-over in the air: ‘As an artist he has to produce things that are not art.’ A tree revolves slowly, Zappa standing against the bole with three branches growing out of his head, one of which is bleeding. He speaks, the voice recognizable from his recordings: ‘One day reality will overtake me.’

I meet Rose, in reflective mood. ‘Look at this heather. See how white it is. I phoned up my parents yesterday and told them about it and they laughed.’ We look into each other’s eyes and then both come together, in a kiss.

Micheal has red nails! I’m dunking goldfish in jam jars!

I keep seeing Lee Harwood everywhere, sometimes naked (as in Jud’s photograph in the recent New Departures). Image of Lee Harwood’s first wife Marion whom I’ve not met. (I know she isn’t called Marion; Marion is a later friend, dedicatee of ‘Love in the Organ Loft’.) The duplicator, on which I print the early Supranormal pamphlets, is malfunctioning (again). Somebody is laughing at this, but I’m flying over a ‘surreal’ landscape.

I receive ‘A’ for an essay from Anthony Thwaite. I’m embarrassed because Colin did more work but received a lower grade.

I’m with Trudy on Southwick beach. We’re talking about love. She’s trying to convert me. I see her the next night, same place. ‘See what I mean?’ I argue, saying something about ‘changeless as the sea’. I’ve left a fishing rod on the beach. I return again. A teacher tells me it’s raining. I’ve left a history book there too. It might be ruined. I go back to fetch the items. I see John and Mick. They’ve just been to see the monster, they say. I tell them that sometimes it’s got four eyes and sometimes just one giant one! Image of the eye, huge in the air.

A large furry man walks up the path, talking to Puny Pete about Mississippi John Hurt. I see another grotesque dark figure outside beyond them. He points at me as I open the living room window in Southwick. He’s moving towards me. There’s no escape.

Robert G. Sheppard 1975/Robert Sheppard 2025

Note: Napoleon reportedly said that if you wanted to understand a man then you needed to look at the world in the year he was twenty. I like to think that André Breton might have said, a century later, that if you want to understand a person you need to look at the dreams they had when they were twenty. Although I think Nappy has it, these are my dreams from the year 1975, during which I was twenty. The little Letts Diary, its spine split from the effort of typing it up, offers a secret, not-quite-private counterpart to my ‘daytime’ 1975 diary and journal, which I used to write parts of my ‘autrebiography’, Words Out of Time. (The odd line appears in both texts.) It is a natural autrebiography, one might say. The dream diary carries a title at its end: the solipsist’s headparty which I have adopted as its subtitle. I have polished up its rough and hasty recording, sometimes providing context which was obvious to me, particularly where (oddly one might think after half a century) I remember the dream itself. This text was first posted, in installments, on the 50^th anniversary of their entries on my blog Pages. I worked the resultant text, sections for each month, paragraphs for each entry, even deleting the odd passage, not to make narrative, exactly, but not to defy it either.