I, for example, had an actual dream that really happened to me while I was asleep in my bed. This dream was that Harvard SDS and the Harvard workers--buildings and grounds, the kitchen people, and others--got together and formed a worker-student alliance. They went on a general strike together, and the workers were going around slamming kids on the back saying what loyal friends they were. Now that idea struck me, even while I slept, as being genuinely funny.

* * * * *

ONE misunderstands the Lampoon if he thinks of it as a publication. Aside from being a tax-free museum which opens its doors once a year to maintain this status (but never announces that one date), it is primarily a club. Its members pay dues, which are munched away at the extravagant banquets served around a long table in the high-arched chandelier-strung main hall.

In the months that followed the overly successful Playboy parody, they served dinners there almost every weekend which stretched the limits of gourmet excess. Cases of incredible wines were flown in from France. And the entire interior was fixed up to greater-than-Hearst elegance, including the repair of the rare delphic tiles that cover the walls downstairs, at a cost of about $50,000.

Not that the Lampoon isn't beneficent. Since they came into the coin in '66, every issue has been free to undergraduates. And for years they've been supporting their over-seventy janitor, Elmer Green (who's done nothing but impersonate dignitaries on magazine covers), in their cellar. And as soon as the Lampoon can afford it, they plan to move him to a nicer apartment in Somerville . . . so they can "build a darkroom down there."

There's been a lot of talk about the Lampoon doing a movie one of these days, but that is probably an effort more meticulous than they're capable of. They have come out with a second LP, which was partly inspired by the Lampoon's house rock band, the Central Park Zoo, whose members include Poonies Mark Stumpf and Peter Gabel, and whose single 45 record can be played on the juke-box in nearby Tommy's Lunch. Along with Stumpf, the prime movers behind the new record were Jonathan Cerf, who was once Ibis, and former Hasty Pudding Show writer, Peter Larson.

Parody has a point only if those who are doing the parody are fully capable of doing whatever it is they parody and then if they only make slight changes, which are meaningful rather than merely absurd. Following this logic, almost all parodies of, say, fifties rock'n'roll are just stupid. Bad singing and bad sound simply doesn't parody something that's musically better. The Lampoon's earlier record, "The Harvard Lampoon Tabernacle Choir Sings at Leningrad Stadium," was a drag; the Mothers of Invention records are great. "The Surprising Sheep and Other Mind Excursions" is very good.

It is good because the music is both original and good. If it were a little better and if they had a singer who wasn't so needlessly bad, they could have gotten a hit record out of this and made even more money for their castle, and moved their janitor to Newton, even.

The best songs are "Lazy Summer" and "One Born Every Minute" (two very groovy tunes with lots of chimes, kazoos, concertinas, and other new sounds), "God" (an old Lampoon song about who is responsible for poverty, earthquakes, and the striking of such instruments of Fate as lightning), "The Surprising Sheep" (the title song alluding to the old Lampoon joke: "See the merino standing there with his long shaggy hair"), and "Welcome to the Club" (a song so much like the Lovin' Spoonful that someone ought to do something about it).

The record jacket is quite nice, too.

It doesn't particularly bother me, now that they no longer sell subscriptions, that the Lampoon doesn't publish the eight times a year it pretends to promise. I think that people should write only what they're really up for. And the continued existence of such a thing as the Lampoon in rank, undeserved decadence doesn't bother me either.

But I'm afraid the eyes of the Lampoon have been caught by the men with the money. All they talk about these days are the big deals they're about to get into with all these entrepreneurial adults. Things like the Life parody are done almost entirely to make money. The Lampoon guys are in a rare position of established detachment, and they should either write down what this position inspires them to think, or maybe sponsor some fun and games on the outside.