I meet a brilliant, magnetic man--Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson? Or Leaves of Grass--not the book of poems, but the famous AI who lives inside an electronic copy of Leaves Of Grass. Only here, he takes a human form. Hmmm.... Let's call this Concord idealist, this magnetic man... "A". Trust me, we can't call him X; we'll run out of letters.

A and his girlfriend B ride on top of a car or truck, holding on just by sprawling and tangling themselves. I sometimes seem to be B, sometimes their friend C. B and C/I are a bit horny and love holding each other. I feel secure and delightfully intimate, holding onto the car roof by linking bodies, holding her inner thigh or stomach or crotch. I love we're in public yet no one can do a thing. Drive-by exhibitionism!

But A changes swiftly--gets bored with this incarnation and decides to go try some other life entirely. He turns into a small, swiftly moving cloud, flying against the wind, who sails up through holes in the overcast. He becomes a tiny, brilliant sun, and flies away.

B is hurt that he left her behind, and she takes it out on me. She turns into an antique plane and starts diving on me, buzzing lower and lower with each pass. So I turn into D, a little baby, and crouch in the gutter: now I don't stick up at all. There's a true baby here named E, that B and I conceived, as well as me the fake baby... Oh, and one adult: B! Being buzzed by B's self, or a facsimile! Though sometimes she seems to be her buddy Walt Whitman...

A bit confusing, these changes.

Now I turn into the adult B and B becomes the baby! Ha! So I pick up Baby D and Baby E, and flee the buzzing biplane B.

Not just B, but a whole crowd of people hunt us thru bus-yards, whorehouses, tennis courts, Stanford student housing--a weird, senseless jumble. Turn corners fleeing, and lose all my friends, lose my babies.

On and on... alone and so tired...

I'm younger now, a girl we'll call F, a Stanford student. I beg two women who turn the corner "Don't raise an alarm!" They lead me down a hall to a classroom, where I change from a student into a Frenchman named G, a famous ethnologist who worked in Africa. The other great French ethnologist, H, gets an award today; I'm here to give the introductory speech. Or am I here for an award too?

I walk my bike up and down ramps and tilted floors while talking and listening. Funny, the bike makes an odd hissing sound. I check. Oh. While H got his award, I leaned on the bike from an angle. That pressed the wheel, and its axle was a bit loose; as it tilted, it rubbed against the brake shoe.

And so I hear a whispering voice. The voice of I.

The Whisper of Resistance.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Kaleidoscopic, bewildering changes: I've been drawing my own Tarot deck. I identify with each figure as I draw it, as if I'm trying on identities like dresses in a boutique changing-room. So in my dream, too, I slip on identities, genders, ages, cultures...
• Leaves of Grass, an AI who lives in a book: a major character in Roger Zelazny's book Roadmarks.
• The French ethnologist: Claude Levi-Strauss, I think. But who's the other one? Don't know my Frenchmen.
• Bike as deep self: is that strange? Bikes are solo vehicles--hard to merge, freeload, offer rides, tow or be towed. No motor, fuel, schedules or tickets. Just you!
• The Whisper of Resistance: all that "sound and fury, signifying nothing" sure distracted me from hearing that soft voice of I, huh?

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