My dream had me pushing carts around a hotel basement somewhere and there was a vague menace.

Last night I dreamed I was sewing up babies' heads with thick silk skeins of embroidery thread, garnet red, sky blue, and grass green. The skeins were wound in the usual lazy 8 shape but the thread was difficult, slippery, and I thought the thread was actually skeins of human veins in spite of their marvelous colors and textures. The babies were lined up in a long crib in a Victorian hospital. They weren't crying, but they were quiet. I guess passive would be a good word. Perhaps they had been drugged. The embroidery thread slithered in and out of my needle, refusing to stay put so I was constantly stopping to re-thread, and this was the only thing that caused me concern.

I worked with someone called Michael, who traveled in disguise for much of the time. He was a superman type who righted wrongs. There was also a female character in my dream who was evil. She morphed into different disguises to fool me and others into thinking we were safe. Then she assumed her original shape. She could create multiple characters at once.

I had been out to dinner with a daughter/sister who sat with her new extended family. She fed her baby from a bottle. I was intrigued to watch a bottle fed baby. The idea that you could actually see the milk disappearing, you could see the milk go into the baby reassured his mother I imagined unlike my experience when you could only trust that the breast fed baby was getting enough to drink simply by the amount of sucking she did and by the feel of your breasts between feeds, before and after.

I held the baby for a while and for some reason took him with me back to my room in a nearby castle. I had the baby wrapped loosely in it blanket and I worried that he would not feel safe with me once he recognised his mother was not there.

Michael my superman colleague arrived and told me that he was worried we were in danger. We would need to travel above the local area and look into the backs of other houses and castles to see what was going on.

‘I have to take the baby home first,’ I said.

‘Leave him here,’ Michael said, but no, I insisted, I must return him to his mother I could not leave him alone.

‘Wait for me, Michael,’ I said. ‘Wait for me.’

I worried Michael would not wait. I raced back to the family gathering and handed the baby back to his mother. She seemed disgruntled, not so much because I had taken her baby for a walk but because somehow earlier I had led her to believe that her extended family were not all they were cracked up to.

One member of her family was Malcolm Frazer, ex prime minister of Australia. At one stage he announced to the table that he was getting old. He spelt out his age – seventy-three years. In the dream he seemed much older than that.

I went back to Michael who was sorting out a car in which to make our trip. I needed to collect a final something from my room. On the way downstairs I recognised a woman on the stairs ahead of me as one of the evil woman’s stooges. I would not be fooled. I grabbed hold of her before she had a chance to attack me and squeezed her so tight her disguise fell away. I threw her onto the floor. Several other stooges appeared, all dressed as respectable staff or guests of the castle in which I was staying. I could not battle them all. I fled back to the car park to escape with Michael. The evil woman was in hot pursuit.

‘Michael,’ I called, ‘Michael.’ But when I looked to where his car – an old VW – had been, it was not there. No sign of Michael either and I knew then he had assumed a disguise. He could have been in any one of the cars that now occupied the car park. There were cars in all shapes and sizes rather like my grandson’s matchbox collection, sporty races, ambulance cars and caravans. There were conventional cars and old-fashioned re-furbished types.

Where was he? I knew – I hoped – he would rescue me. Somehow the evil woman also knew that Michael was somewhere in the car park. She did not lunge for me, therefore, perhaps hoping he would materialize. I woke up.

Last night I dreamed I brought my violin to work and went to the river and played Mozart's Turkish violin concerto. People were running on the path and no one stopped to listen they didn't acknowledge me but the fish in the river came together in a large arrow with the tip of the arrow pointing at me and watched.

I dreamed I was pushing a Victorian pram and I was stopped on a cobblestone street by a police officer who looked in the pram and demanded to know where my baby was so I took off my sweater (pink cashmere with pearl buttons) and bundled it up and placed it in the pram and said There.

I'm at a table with other people, including Rauan. We have to decide whether or not we're going to enter into some kind of challenge. It's four parts with deadly consequences. For the first challenge we need to select a particular button on a dog's collar. If we don't agree to accept the challenge, the dog blows up. If we do, we have to press the "accept" button on the collar. Rauan is participating in the challenge, but I also suspect that he's the one behind it. The committee agrees to press the accept button. The dog lives.

The second challenge is timed. Two committee women are controlling a cursor on a screen. Our task is to decide between two buttons. One button is to continue the challenge, the other is to quit. If we quit, a well-known poet blogger will be blown up. The decision is made last minute although each woman selected a different button. I'm not sure if that's an accident or intentional--meaning I wasn't sure if they had different opinions or just weren't working well together. We decide to save the poet blogger although it seems likes the button was clicked a second after the deadline. Now I'm wondering if perhaps the dog and poet blogger might not have really exploded. Maybe Rauan is just using the threat of explosion as an incentive for us to take this all seriously.

Before we begin the third challenge a bunch of plain-clothed agents come in. I tell Rauan that they've set their sights on him. They take him into another room for questioning.

* * *

The next day I dreamed:

Rauan is driving a convertible in Virginia (Leesburg). It's snowing. He gets out and lets me drive. The driver's seat is full of snow. My body doesn't fit the mold that Rauan's body made. I'm having a difficult time reaching the pedal or finding the wheel.

In my dream last night I walked along Riversdale Road and found that my neighbour’s house had been rearranged for a performance that was to be held there over the next day.

I sat in a café and eavesdropped on a conversation between a mother and her daughters. At least I assumed they were her daughters. All had dark black hair. They chattered joyously in that bickering sort of way families do.

I watched them walk out of the restaurant and then along Riversdale Road. They were connected with the performance somehow. I soon found that the husband of the woman with the dark hair and father of the three girls was the director of the play. He had a Scottish accent. I stood in the street and talked to the woman. I introduced myself. She commented on the size and wasted space of our neighbour’s house in which the play was to be performed.

‘I’d change it,’ she said. ‘I’d pull down the front.’

I did not tell the woman that my husband and I had plans to buy this house if ever it came on the market. It adjoined ours and we would love to own the whole space. The woman went on her way and as I walked back home I realised I had the wrong property in mind. The play was to be performed not at my neighbour’s smaller house but in a mansion two blocks further down the road in a place currently occupied by the Jesuits. This was a magnificent space, with a sweeping circular staircase, deep red carpets, and heavy velvet curtains. I was allowed to walk around inside and watched the actors go through their paces.

Towards the end of my dream, which had many twists and turns; I wound up standing on the edge of a high grassy hill overlooking the first full dress rehearsal. I stood with the director of the play. We held hands. His daughters joined us. They were older than my daughters.

One of my daughters had a lead role in the play. I was stunned at the beauty of her singing. I looked down to my feet and realised that the hill on which I stood was in fact a steep slope, so steep that it ran like a wall to the ground. I slid down. I could not get any traction in the grass and lost hold of the director’s hand.

‘It happens like that,’ he said. ‘As soon as you realise where you’re standing, you lose your grip.’

I arrived at the stadium with my cherished copy of Finnegans Wake. I was joined by several others in a grassy area, a kind of walkway high upon its rim. We were to give a performance of some kind. As the stadium filled with people, I put my book on a long narrow table, then fell into conversation with a grown friend from grade school. She seemed to be in charge. She asked if I would be singing. I told her I hadn’t planned to, but could if she wanted. The stadium grew louder and louder. I went back and looked out over the rim — there was now a sea of people. Everyone was dressed in white and holding a little round light, a kind of third red eye glowing against their chests. Afraid I might fall in, I stepped away from the edge and stood by some foliage. I was on a narrow graveled road. From there, I could see that my book was missing. The sun had set. The performance began. I couldn’t see him, but I immediately recognized the voice of James Joyce. He was reading a passage from his book. It was then that I realized I had completely forgotten what I was supposed to do. In my foolish confidence, I had felt so prepared that I hadn’t brought any notes. The reading ended. Joyce was followed by someone playing an electric guitar. The musician was facing the audience, but standing in a shell where he couldn’t be seen. My stomach was in an uproar. I knew I was next. But I couldn’t go on. At the last moment, I asked someone if he knew who had stolen my copy of Finnegans Wake. He smiled and shrugged. As the music ended, I set off down the road, embarrassed, disappointed, ashamed.

I dream about people I am not actually close to so that when I wake up, my first thoughts are run-over emotions and connections that are completely fabricated. I do not blame my dreams.
I own a strange purse that I would never actually touch in reality and it is empty except for my hand digging inside of it. My hand is full of rings I have stolen and their sharp designs dig lightly into my skin. I am shopping in a mall of complete glamour and I cannot stop stealing. No one can catch me and so I continue because I know I can. My friends are mad at me and they run steps ahead of me and pretend they don't know me. I look down and see that I am dressed like them and this makes me want to scream. I think I have stolen everything I am wearing.

Before, we were at a party. The alcohol was low and everyone was dressed for summer and wearing shades of blue. I felt misplaced and angry. I think it was because I knew I would not be drunk. This makes me angry in reality.

When I awoke, I was speaking out loud explaining to my friends why they should still like me and my black cat is wrapped between my legs. My teeth hurt so I take a vicodin.

DEATH

Whenever I have nightmares
It's the tonton macoutes I'm dreaming about
The other night I dreamed
They made me carry my coffin on my back
Everyone on all the Port-au-Prince streets was laughing at me
There were 2 or 3 boys not laughing
The other night I dreamed
They made me dig my grave in the cemetery
Everyone on television was laughing at me
There were 2 or 3 girls not laughing
The other night I dreamed
A macoute squad was getting ready to shoot me
Everyone was laughing
There was an old woman who wasn't laughing
Those little boys and girls there -
If I say more the devil will steal my voice
The old woman
Is Shooshoon Fandal
They brought her to see the macoutes shoot
Her 5 sons on a street in Grand Gosier.

Félix Morisseau-Leroy, "Shooshoon." Translation from Creole by Jack Hirschman and Boadiba.

Poem excerpted from 1/16/10 NYTimes Week in Review article by Madison Smartt Bell, "Haiti in Ink and Tears: A Literary Sampler."

I am teaching a class of pre school students, substituting for Iris P, the permanent teacher. I believe I was chosen because of unique, but undefined qualifications. Chatting at lunch, I discover that others of no talent have been given a similar job. Deflation and depression set in. But soon, I once more, become pleased with myself and my ability to charm a class of pre school students into focusing on reading Huckleberry Finn.

The children seem to be enjoying themselves. Iris then reappears and sends me on a field trip. I take about 30 children, accompanied by a group of parents. We spontaneously board a bus—that turns out to be an express. We try in vain to get off. Screaming and ringing the bell. We disembark miles from our destination.

We begin to walk back to school. The children wander into the street. I try to reach Iris by phone, but am unable to. “Help!” One by one, the parents leave. I am alone with the children, running from front to back of the line, attempting to move the kids on to the sidewalk. I fail, as the line snakes into traffic. Cars veer to avoid them. Finally, several kids are hit. An oncoming bus sends children flying. How will I report the incident? This is my main concern. I reflect back on myself, horrified. I wake up screaming, “KIDS!’’

..............(2 poems distilled from dream)

........................Children Walking

........................Middle of the road

........................Oncoming traffic

........................Children skipping

........................Oncoming traffic

.........................Inevitability looming

........Pride

worm emerges

seduced by the sun

toyed with

swallowed by

.................blue jay squawking

.................breast thrust

punt return specialist

reaches goal

beats chest

sambas on opponent’s back

..................fifteen yard

....................penalty assessed

My youngest and richest brother has loaned me his car. I can drive it though I find it difficult to control. It is a huge four-wheel drive monster elevated well above the rest of the cars on the road. In order to get inside I need to hoist myself in through the sunroof. Once inside, after I switch on the ignition I am aware that I drive almost by remote control. I do not know how otherwise to drive this car. I manage to take it places. I go to the shops. I stop at a market stall. I sit opposite a couple of women, one of whom I recognise from my school days.

‘Are you Anna T?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ she says amazed that I recognise her. After we chat about life at my old school she remembers my name. I talk to another woman on my other side at the table who is dressed in the pale blue uniform of her daughter’s school. This school is different from my old school. This school uniform belongs to the student who attends the prestigious Saint Catherine’s girls school in South Yarra. The woman who must be in her fifties looks odd in her daughter’s uniform.

‘I’m planning to raffle it at auction as a fund raiser,’ she says.

The market hall is filled with shoppers many of whom this woman seems to know. Someone suggests she takes offers for the dress here and now before the auction begins.

‘Any bids?’ the woman calls out and another calls back, ‘Thirty five dollars’.

I wonder will they extend the bidding here and is it fair? I could raise it a dollar but the thought comes to me as I find myself walking up the school path of my old school that I do not need any more clutter in my life. What would I do with such a thing? I would probably fold it away in some dark cupboard somewhere and look at it only when I move house or spring clean.

I make a telephone call to my younger sister. I want to know whether it is okay for me to talk to her on Christmas day. For some reason I need to line up the call otherwise it will not happen. I plead with her to let me ring but my sister is silent on the other end of the line. I can hear her breathing but she will not agree or disagree. I am frantic at the silence.

I find myself back in my brother’s car trying to get home. I meet a woman who warns me that she too once owned such a car and in the event of a crash it was positively dangerous. There was no way of controlling it.

I take a tram to get to a meeting in the middle of the city. I have trouble finding the right tram. Eventually I am at the meeting and the offer goes out for someone to participate on a project related to my thesis topic. Somehow it has a Halloween quality as if the project will involve ghosts. I tell the group that I would like to be part of such an experiment but I do not say it forcefully enough. Another woman beside me, an older woman says that she will be the experimental subject and the group organiser chooses her. It does not do to be timid I think, as I watch the woman retreat out through the back of the room. She is off on an adventure but were I to participate in such an adventure I realise it might be overwhelming. It might drive me mad. Still I feel jealous of the woman who has the guts to speak out loudly and as a consequence gets her way.

I wake up.

In my dream I am at a writer’s convention, a workshop of sorts, akin to the one held in the Blue Mountains of Katoomba, but the location is different. This workshop is held near the beach. The houses in which the workshop participants are located sit atop two rocky outcrops that overlook the sea. It is necessary between sessions to walk from one house to the other and sessions are short. Generally they run for about fifteen minutes each.

I can keep up the pace through the first few days but coming towards the end of the workshop I begin to feel tired. Tired and disappointed. I have not connected well with any of my fellow participants. Although I have made an effort to be friendly and to chat, no one else is forthcoming. Every conversation is brief and superficial.

There is a hierarchy of superiority at this workshop as well. The more advanced writers are given the opportunity to stay on an extra day free of charge but they will need to run a group for novice writers in return.

I would like to be in this position but I have not been chosen and even if I were I could not. I have made arrangements to return home after a week and I cannot extend my stay. I feel unhappy and dissatisfied in a familiar way. I long to feel part of this group but I cannot. Even the woman with whom I travelled to the workshop, a woman whom I have known for a long time, disappoints me. She is tight and ungenerous. She is even reluctant to join the final dinner on the last evening.

I overhear a man on his mobile phone making arrangements for this dinner, which I would like to join and somehow he hands me the phone and I have a brief conversation with my husband about my plans for my return. When I finish the conversation I offer first to let the man use my mobile phone to make up for the time spent on his.

‘Alternatively,’ I say, ‘I can pay the cost of the call. How much do you reckon it’s worth?’

The man is lying on a couch beside his girlfriend.

‘About $150.00,’ she says, without even looking at him.

‘That’s an expensive phone call, ‘ I say. ‘Are you sure?’

‘It could even be as high as two hundred,’ she says.

I retract my offer to pay money. ‘You can use my phone instead.’ I feel ripped off; cheated by this couple and suddenly I am exhausted. I struggle back to the other house and decide to opt out of the next group meeting.

I need to climb three steps to get to my room but am hindered by a man asleep on the top step. He grabs hold of my leg as I climb over the top of him. It seems a friendly gesture and I welcome the contact. Then one of the organisers, a man with a clipboard, comes along and tells me I must return for the next session. I tell him I have plans to skip it but he insists.

The other man still asleep on the top step ignores the organiser and I would like to do likewise but I cannot. I grab my notebook and make my way back to the group. Before I get there I and wake up.

I’m alone on my back in a field. A low-flying, slow-moving goose stops directly above me. I close my eyes. When I open them, I see the blind-hungry face of an owl. I show him my hands to prove I’m not dead. His blink is a nod. He moves on.

In my dream my sister and I are on holidays from boarding school. My sister is a cross between my daughter and my sister, the two flip about in my dream but I notice this only now as I write the dream down. In my dream their identity is stable.

We travel on an escalator in a fabric shop in search of material for a new doona or bedspread. Either we will buy the necessary material or we will buy the finished product, whichever we find that best resembles the colour my sister is after. She has a sample. It is a sea green colour more turquoise but one that is predominantly green not blue.

I have traveled here in this shop alone and I have some sense that I know my way about but everything seems to have changed and when we ask directions to the manufacturer’s counter from a fellow shopper within this huge department store, she tells us that it no longer exists.

We are standing at the foot of a straight ladder like staircase. I consider the possibility of going up but another shopper gets in before me and I give way to her. She must be in her mid fifties this woman and surprises me at her determination to climb this ladder even as in one hand she carries a heavy bag.

She manages to climb about ten stairs and I am close behind. Somehow I decide this trip is not worth it and I urge my sister/my daughter below to stay put. Then we walk down to the basement, where we come across a dark room called the bored room. We go inside and see a group of fellow students and one mother at a cafeteria style bar where they help themselves to coffee and ice cream.

No, I say to my daughter/sister we will not stop here. We do not need to stop here. We are not bored.

So I’m discussing changes to the description of a class, simplifying it, not demanding so much of the students. The registrar agrees and is saving me a space for the new description and title. There must be some field or something that I have to get across. There always is. Then there’s the question of who needs to be on the beach—I or my mother. That’s part of it—the mother has to sit on the beach and wait. It gives her an excuse to be there. I think it’s me, waiting for my daughter.

Then I am trying to restore the back of a building. It seems to need painting. Is what I have painted good or not? Who is in charge? There are words on the walls, but the question is not what they say, but how do they look. Inside the rooms are full of things I don’t care about, and I’m trying to get the kids to understand that can’t let just anyone in, into the bathroom. Everywhere I turn there are flounces and trim, things I don’t like or need.

I am busy trying to get rid of someone who is being kicked out, kicked off the team. The color green is a marker, trying to keep it in mind. Tension remains in my upper arms and neck. I am getting help to get rid of someone, thinking I am someone else. How do I know? Living under the roof like a refugee, they will clear out Costa’s stuff. I read “inlaid” when the word was undone. I broke the sentence off, knowing how it might continue.

There was a large map on a table. We were adding water to it with a kind of spongy roller device. Someone showed us a specific area to make sopping wet. Then someone whose origin was that area came by and we showed her that her area was really wet. At first she didn’t get it, but we knew eventually she’d be upset. There was a wild man with little black legs and a handlebar moustache who showed up like a crazy revolutionary. It was if his legs were singed. I forgot to call Paul on the Epiphany. Then someone in my dream complains.

Later in a new dream there is a storage unit that has a way to remove something from it because there is a blue light inside it. The blue light is key. I am not worried that my dreams slip away, I no longer feel worried and I sense that I am no longer searching and anxious about it. The search is mild. The blue light keeps shining.

She was tall and elegant; the woman who came to stay, but there was something wrong. I sensed it. The back details of this dream have faded but I remember the woman offering to show us. She closed the door of my bedroom and began to peel off her clothes layer by layer. There were several layers: a long sleeved dress, followed by another, then an underskirt and two t shirts, an under blouse; so many layers of clothes and as she took one layer off after another I guessed out loud,

‘It’s because you’re thin’.

I was right, I could see already her pencil thin arms, but hers was not an ordinary thinness and when she finally peeled off the final layer of her underwear and stood before us naked I could see that it was a problem not only of thinness but also of digestion or some such ailment. It had so impacted on the texture and thickness of her skin that every item of her internal organs and structure was visible beneath the thin layer of her skin. Like a translucent membrane, it held the parts in place.

I could see the shape of her heart beating, the layered lines of her rib cage. Her intestines coiled like a thick string of beads and the little sack of her stomach bulged to one side in the middle near a smaller sack, her bladder.

I write this to describe the image of a woman who carried her insides on the outside, like a heart on her sleeve and this to the extreme. She reminded me of those illustrations you see in doctor’s surgeries, the ones designed to demonstrate the location of the various parts of the human body, the parts we cannot see.

In my dream the woman became my child and I knew that I should feed her. I sat her in front of a bowl of chicken pieces and began to entice her with other foods, left over Japanese food, sushi and sashimi. Elsewhere I took some noodles from the plate of another child who was eating nearby and encouraged my thin girl to eat up more and more. I knew that if I could feed her well enough over time her skin would grow thick and she would no longer need to hide herself behind these multiple layers of clothes.

I and three other people (an old man and two women) were trying to invade Cuba on makeshift rafts. One raft to a person. They were just boards nailed together, tho each of us had a mound, a couple of feet high, of cooked rice for provisions. The old man was lost at sea, but the rest of us were picked up immediately as we went ashore. Our plan had been to attend a dance there, to let the Cubans know that we were not a danger, and to leave wallets behind that had lots of cash in Cuban bills for people to live a little more easily.

The head nun, who was a cross between the head mistress from my schooldays in the late sixties, Sister M, and the principle of my daughters’ school now, handed me a slip of paper. It included a description of the role I was to perform in the school play.

I looked at it briefly and felt disappointed. I was standing in the middle of the schoolyard down near the quadrangle when the head mistress, whom I shall from now on call Sister M, came over to ask whether I was happy with my part.

‘I’m not really,’ I dared to say. I dared only tell her because somewhere earlier in my dream I had read through the school manual and in it I had seen written that there was a place to complain about parts allocated in the school play if you were not satisfied.

Even as I told Sr M that I was unhappy with my part I thought I should keep it to myself. I should have swallowed my pride, but it was too late, it was out.

‘It’s a small part, I know Sister M said but we need to give the main parts to those who are best able to take on particular roles, even so this one gives you a chance to demonstrate your skills.’

One of my sisters stood nearby. She came over to see what all the fuss was about. Sister M left and my sister read through the description of my role.

‘It’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘You’re part of the roaring forties, a small part maybe, but you’ll be on stage most of the time.’

I knew then that I should not have complained but the idea of being on stage as part of the chorus in the background, nodding and smiling, gesticulating or whatever else was required, did not pleased me. Against my wishes, I began to cry. By the time Sister M arrived back with two other possible roles in the play that I might prefer I was sobbing.

I did not want these parts. It was okay. I felt apologetic and embarrassed, but as I write down my memory of the dream now, my sorrow was tinged with anger. I knew it would not do to cry, but I could not stop. Then whether I decided it was strategic for me to suggest that I was worried about other things, like how I might do in my final year at school, I do not know. But I took this line.

It was around March during my matriculation, the title of my final year at school. It seemed a more legitimate thing to be upset about than the role I would have in the play. Besides as I sobbed, I realised it was true. I was worried about my schoolwork.

I had slipped behind. I had been sick, in the same way as my oldest daughter, who in the dream became my daughter who had been sick with glandular fever the year before and virtually lost the best part of her year ten year. I was now worried that I would slip further behind, too.

I had always imagined that when you work hard then you will be rewarded with good results, but this was not happening for me now. The role I had been allocated in the school play, a small bit part on the sidelines was proof of this.

The head mistress held me in her arms to comfort me but I felt on display, the entire school of girls were watching. I did not trust the head mistresses concern. In between turns of talking to me, and holding me between the folds of her billowing black habit, she was dealing with the usual school business. She was introducing herself to would be parents of other schoolgirls and dealing with other teachers’ concerns.

Every time she turned away, I looked around me through blurry eyes at the schoolyard and wondered what I was dong there. The whole place seemed to have changed. I could no longer feel connected and I was convinced I would now fail my final school year because things no longer made sense to me as they once did.

There was an entire subject, a foreign language, something like Polish that I was meant to have studied that year but I knew not one single word of it. I wanted to tell Sister M about this but she was busy talking to yet another set of parents and by the time she came back to me the rest of the school were seated at tables for lunch. I was now back in boarding school.

Sister M looked around for a space at a table for me. The girls were all familiar to me but I could not feel a connection with any of them. I sat down at the far end near a group of girls mid conversation. They looked at me but did not engage. They did not ask questions nor did they seem interested in why I was upset. They were not judgemental about it. They were simply indifferent. I could have been invisible for all they cared.

Scatty dreams, of schoolgirls gathering in our lounge room as if they are camping. I’m looking after a small child/baby who can only now just walk and talk. I see that someone has painted over the check tiles in the bathroom in deep red paint. It could have looked good to begin with but the paint was not right for the surface and it is peeling in places, cracked in others and flaking off in large hunks at the points of greatest activity.

A lizard appears from under the skirting board, long and black with a face like Batman, or Zorro, a face whose patterning gives the appearance of a mask and the lizard darts into the room where the schoolgirls congregate. They seem unbothered but my baby boy follows and wants to engage with the lizard.

I warn him off. He’s too young. I tell him when he is older and taller, then he can talk to the lizard, but not now.

For now I hope the lizard will disappear but I see that the lizard is also interested in my child. Perhaps because they are of similar height, at least they would be were the lizard to stand on its hind legs and reach for the ceiling. The lizard and the small boy eye one another off until I scoop the boy into my arms, and the lizard streaks away.

I turn to the gathering of schoolgirls with the odd boy in between.

‘Could you guys please tidy this place up before the end of the day?'

One person only responds with assurances that they will. The rest are silent. I comment on this to my oldest daughter who has walked into the room. I do not want to embarrass her. This is easy to do at this time of the day, but I want help with the mess.

I had a valuable vintage guitar--like the psychedelically painted Les Paul that Jimmy Page played with Led Zeppelin. On a guitar stand it rolled down a long, straight road, across the Canadian border, and into the garage of a house like Chester Brown's drawings of his boyhood home in Montreal. From a distance I watched a man pick up my guitar, look it over, and stow it in the back of a truck parked in the garage. Guitars filled and surrounded the truck: apparently the garage was a guitar warehouse.

Later I walked down the road to retrieve my property. After I crossed the Canadian border the houses grew charmingly antiquated and decrepit, the pavement rain-dark and grass-cracked. Everything exuded a barely perceptible aura of Europeanness.

At the garage a young man with pink spiked hair greeted me. He wore a long, olive-drab military coat with cryptic patches and black leather punk boots. He looked like a young Gary Oldman. At first he feigned ignorance of my guitar and invited me to search the truck, but when I persisted he led me to a corner of the garage and showed me my guitar. It was badly damaged. The young man admitted that he had played it and "pushed it to the limit." To quell my rage he swore up and down that he would repair it. I said I'd come back later, but I knew that my guitar was permanently ruined.

Lost in San Francisco, I met a preacher who couldn’t speak, a tall man concerned with giants, a homeless man who wanted what I didn’t have, a trio of young thugs who threatened to beat me but didn’t follow through, a little boy searching for his mom — I followed him down a side street and saw him safely home, then crossed beneath a dripping stairwell where a young man was playing a marble game and betting against himself ... reaching in my pocket I found what I thought might be a phone, part TV remote, part bright-red plastic toy, and was about to call my son when I came to a flight of metal stairs leading down, turned at the landing, took a narrow ladder the rest of the way, and there I met another boy who said “Don’t renounce me” three times as if I already had, and I fished in my pocket and found a sodden book of matches, only one of which seemed sound, and I tried to strike it to shed some light upon our shoes, to prove to him that mine were not mine, and his were his.

I was using a pair of hand shears to clip the grass growing along the edge of a sidewalk when I was joined by a man who was curious about what I was doing. His hair was white and very short. His head was narrow. He was wearing glasses. He asked if he could see the shears. I stood up and handed them to him. As I did, they became an ax in his hand. His first swing was aimed at the grass. The blow landed perfectly just where I had stopped cutting. He took a breath and adjusted his grip. My body tensed with fear. His second swing was aimed at my neck. I yelled myself awake.

In actual life, I own this 19th century, linen nightgown with the original owner's name penned on it in brown ink. In my dream, I'm wearing this nightgown, and I wander outside onto our front porch. It's both summer and winter out. The moon is bright and the light is blue. I notice/remember that we cut a hole in the roof over the porch to make a little mini-Moonhenge: the moon's perfect alignment over the hole in the porch roof at a certain time of year would allow a column of light to pour onto the porch floor. I decide to lie down on the floor under the column of moonlight for magical purposes.

Then I realize that if our houseguests find me out there, I'd have a hard time explaining it, so I go back inside.

My dream comes back to me. I was at a conference, or maybe it was more like a holiday at a camping ground, where people were staying in small huts or in tents attached to their cars.

It was morning and there were people everywhere. It was difficult to find a free toilet or bathroom and I noticed that the system of each waiting in turn to occupy a bathroom one after the other seemed hopeless. People were skipping the queue, which was not visible, so I took it upon myself to organise the use of showers.

Whenever someone new arrived on the scene I told them where they stood in the invisible queue. ‘You’re sixth in line,’ I said to two men who had come upon two vacant cubicles and were about to go in. There are others ahead of you. They resented it, I could see, and one woman who was about to take her turn stood back and let one of the men jump the queue because she could not bear his anger. I wondered at my presumptuousness, that I should orchestrate this affair. But no one complained, at least not openly.

I stood looking at a billboard on wheels, advertising events. There was a photo on one side of last year’s conference and as I looked I saw that it came alive. The photo turned into a video. It was a re-run of last year’s conference, which I had for some reason enjoyed so much more than this one. Then some of the characters from the video, some of the women from last year’s conference, materialised into people at this year’s conference. They came to say hello. They were pleased to see me.

Another woman came over and complained because she had heard through the grapevine that I had described her as lonely.

‘I am not lonely,’ she said. I felt defensive. I could not remember saying this about her and even if I had, what did it matter. And what about the things she and others had said about me? That I was … And then I told her of my decision to withdraw from the life of the organization that had so haunted me over these last several months.

We stood outside in the morning sunlight in a wide grassy field. I could smell freshly mown hay. I had entered a different world from the one I usually occupied and I could never go back, except perhaps in my memory. All this I considered as I stood talking to this woman from the past, and who could not understand where and why I had gone.

I’m standing at a dirty sink in an old warehouse. Blood is running down my face. There’s a curved gash under the left cheekbone. I thought it was healed. I thought it was a scar. Now it’s open again. My eye, a separate entity watching in horror, also begins to bleed. I turn the faucet, but there’s no water. I set off through the warehouse. There are dusty shafts of light coming through holes in the roof. They strike the floor at odd angles, like searchlights. I see a man, a cousin who died in his seventies almost thirty years ago. He’s wearing a tie and a crumpled brown suit. I say hello. He looks at me but doesn’t answer. I wonder if he can see the blood. I leave him behind. I hear what sounds like water running in a bathtub. I step outside. My wife is there. I say, “I thought you were going to tell me.” She replies gently, “I did tell you. Don’t you remember?” She hands me a cool wet cloth. I press it against the wound. “Almost,” I say, but the image of it is quickly gone.

In my dream this morning I was back at my old school Vaucluse convent about to sit my final year English exam. In some ways I felt prepared. I had studied hard but for some reason it also felt like I was ill prepared as though the exam date had snuck up on me. I had earlier been shopping for clothes. I chose to visit Gidget in my search for a new jumper. I wanted something hip and colourful, something in an unusual style, something that might stand out from the conventional jumpers we wore every day. The shop was crowded and rather than queue for the dressing rooms I took a couple of jumpers I had already selected outside to my car and tried them on out there in the street. This did not seem such a remarkable thing to do until I considered the fact that it could look like shoplifting. How had I managed to walk so blithely out of the shop with two security-coded jumpers under my arm and not so much as one person batted an eyelid.

Now it was time to go for the exam. The entire year twelve class was lined up at the door ready to walk through the school gardens and into the assembly hall where we would sit our exam. Once Sister Marie, our English teacher had issued the order, we moved out carelessly in raggle-taggle groups of threes and fours all talking noisily. She did not object. It was fine for us to wander at our leisure to the tense destination that awaited us or so I thought. I was conscious of feeling that I would have liked more focus. Then I realised I had forgotten a cardigan or jumper. I would need one during the exam. It could get very cold in the assembly hall especially having to sit for hours.

‘I need to get my jumper’ I said to Sister Marie as I ran back to the class room.

‘Don’t bother,’ she said. But I had already gone and was back at the classroom, which was now sealed off at the downstairs entry way and I had to find some other means of getting to my school bag. I did eventually somehow in that magical way you do in dreams when doors disappear and flights of stairs can be mounted in a breath. I found one of the new jumpers, which I had eventually decided to buy and rushed back to the exam.

Reading time was already over and I looked at the questions. The exam paper was full of illustrations that seemed to come alive and to speak to me in much the way paintings come to life in the Harry Potter films. In the first question we needed to fill in the missing word, ‘mellow rhymes with…?’ I knew the answer as ‘yellow’ and was furious when I over heard one girl sitting nearby whispering the answer to another.

'They’re cheating,’ I wanted to call out. In my dream I am now ashamed to say, I dobbed, but Sister Marie did not seem to care. She was not nearly so fussed about the conduct of my fellow exam participants as I.

On one side I noticed a young woman sitting for the exam with her baby in tow. That will make things difficult I thought but the bab at that stage seemed contented and I thought to myself depending how well I go in finishing this exam, I’ll offer to help out with the baby to give the other woman a chance to finish her paper. On the other side of me my youngest daughter was picking through the paper. It was hard for her. She was only of primary school age, about six or seven.

There was a commotion outside in the quadrangle and the two cheaters got up and went outside to look. ‘More fools they,’ I thought, but then my youngest daughter wanted to join them. I tried to stop here.

‘Let her be, ‘ Sister Marie said. ‘It’s only a trial run for her.’

I knew my need to have things in order as I wanted them was over the top and tried to get back into the exam. The questions fascinated me. They seemed to be relaying a narrative in their own right. The story of someone who had lost her baby. Something akin to the details that exist in Helen Garner’s book, The First Stone – a complex plot I needed to untangle and analyse. The woman who had lost her baby refused to speak up about it and everyone else remained silent.

Amber Tamblyn, at Poetry Foundation's blog, Harriet

[a continuation of the recent previous dream]

I was dead. And here in my dream I was driving my own hearse. Somehow I was to leave by the route I had driven there and I had to return something to some point off of La Brea down an alley. Under my breath i was singing repeatedly with a certain triumph how few get to drive their own hearse. I could begin to smell my own body but it was not a bad smell yet, being fresh. This somehow pleased me for the moment. From my pockets I removed a giant ring of too many keys. Here was a burden I still carried. I was awoken to a quick rasp on my screen door. No one was there.

[Possible dream response to 'The Red Book']

I am on a high rock face leaning against the wall. Unseen passer-bys comment how what a good monument to Christ this could be made into and they place all types of “stations" around me. I agree to stand there and remain with my arms outstretched from time to time. It is decided though that this center figure who is no longer myself should be painted to remain the central focus of the monument. All around is painted one of the most beautiful Burnt Sienna I have ever seen. His body is painted this color too and his cloth a muted red that is quite harmonious to the background color. Voice says here is the painted Christ. The paint though is poisonous as it would be for this person and he becomes sick and is taken down ill before he dies.

I remember dreaming that I was Rod Serling. I mean, I was watching Rod Serling, but at the same time I was Rod Serling. And I was thinking, "I need to find some teleplay-writers; trouble is, no one does that anymore except Jodie Foster." Then I walked into a sort of Quonset hut where shadowy people wound among antique cheval mirrors, tapestries, mahogany furniture--expensive stuff. A woman who resembled my Aunt Cathy--similar dark, shoulder-length hair--sat at a table near the entrance. "Do you have any teleplay-writers?" I asked her. "Hmm," she said. "We've got Jodie Foster in a booth at the back, but that's about it."

I remember a nightmare I had when I was 14, shortly after my sojourn at a church camp. I dreamed that I was sitting in the back seat of a car parked in front of the camp's general store. The engine began to skreek and skritter like the cassette-player I used at the time. Suddenly a gargantuan panther burst out from under the hood--rather like the baby monster c-sectioning himself in Alien. His murderous eyes flashed; his muscles rippled horrifyingly under his sleek black fur. He galloped toward the car, leapt, and rammed the windshield with his head. The resultant crack-web seemed to enmesh me as the slightly dazed panther trotted away from the car, preparing to hurl himself at the windshield again... I awoke with a start.

My friend and I were in an elevator and when the door opened we stepped out into his village in Greece. The ground was lush with soft green grass. There was dew on the grass, and a drowsy blue dragonfly on his coat. There was a small gathering of people. They were his friends and relatives, but there were also some strangers present. In halting English, a man greeted me and asked my name. He was in his sixties. His face was broad and weathered by the elements. His hair, what was left of it, was gray. I told him my name. He said, “William. What does that mean. William.” Before I could answer, he started speaking in Greek. Then he wandered off. I was alone. It occurred to me then that I would have to learn Greek. I told myself that it would be easy, if I let it be easy. I said a few words, and when I couldn’t understand them, I smiled, because they seemed to fit in with the conversation I’d heard so far. There was a wall beside me now. A wall without a ceiling. I could hear Greek voices coming from the other side of the wall. My friend was beside me now. His eyes were bright with happiness. He needed a shave. It reminded me of my childhood, and touching the stubble on my father’s face. I looked at my palm. I wondered if I should. I did. He closed his eyes. “Brothers,” I said. We were now at the edge of a granite cliff. Dark clouds, patches of blue sky. A man’s shadow on the opposite wall of the canyon. Far below, a river from my youth, an old road beside it, small enough to be a worm in my hand.

I dreamt I visited Beckett—he was living in a church on an island in Paris. I rented a rowboat from some boat people to get there, and as I went into the church I could see Beckett writing—he was sitting in the front of the church near the altar, writing on a large sheet of rice paper, but he wasn’t writing in the usual way: there was a penciled outline of a giant rose window on the rice paper, and he wrote each line within a spoke of the wheel. I couldn’t see the words as he wrote them, but the spoke lit up from within as he finished, each spoke a different color. The shape of the rose window was a little like this one in England:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rose_window_Richmond.jpg

The only line I remember him writing was “I want all my lances lined up in a row.”

My husband was driving the car, the children in the back, I in the passenger seat. The baby was asleep in its bassinette in the back section of the station wagon, the same one my father drove when I was a child.

The baby woke up and started to cry.

‘Can we stop the car?’ I asked. It took what seemed like forever before my husband could pull over into a clearing on the side of the road. The longer it took the more hysterical the baby became. But just as we pulled over the baby settled again.

I picked it up, a strange looking baby, with the body of an older child and the face of a bat. I knew I must take responsibility for this baby, even as I needed to get to the airport to collect an old friend, from Tasmania.

At the airport I walked through a restaurant on my way to the collections area. I carried the bat baby now asleep in my arms and hoped that no one would notice it was not an ordinary baby. I feared if they caught sight if its face they might worry this baby was contagious of some exotic disease. As long as the baby slept in my arms I’d be fine.

I wandered around the terminal in search of my friend and came upon her just as she was about to hand over the sixty dollar entrance tax. We opened our purses simultaneously and I handed over forty of the sixty. She found the balance and then went to visit the toilet. She said she’d be ready in a minute.

I took the bat baby for a walk down steps and out to a green grassy oval whereupon several stall holders were selling second hand stuff, like single earrings. I worried the baby would wake. By now I knew it was a boy.

I went to find my friend who was herself by now looking after someone else’s baby. This baby was in a bassinet next door to the toilet. It was screaming. I rocked the cradle till the baby settled back to sleep.

Its mother returned. The bat baby woke up and I worried that the real mother would wonder about the strangeness of my baby.

The alarm went off.

I have to climb down the ruined building - descend easily sliding down on one of the bright blue cushions - swim fully clothed across the blue green calm water - This is a place I know, no it's not - I'm not wearing trousers now - no worries, there's a clothes shop just over the road, but there isn't

My brother has been working much too hard. As he speaks, he sways from side to side, like an elephant or a bridge. All at once, his face turns gray. But his eyes are as bright as ever. My mother, young again, brings supper to the table. We sit down. The gray departs from my brother’s face. I can see dry hills through our old kitchen window.

I'm walking along the edge of the old Polish cemetery that borders a golf course near the house where I grew up. I hung out here a lot when I was younger. The world is sort of blueish and wintery, cool weather that's excellent for walking. On my walk, I'm accompanied by a rabbit companion who hops along with me. I'm in paradise - perfect weather, good rabbit-y company, in an old and familiar place I love.

I get "home" (wherever THAT is) and I meet my sister-in-law L. who is upset that I'm walking. She thinks it's pathetic that I'm on foot. She tells me that she just got me a "Prius Stellata - you have no idea how rare these are and how lucky we are to find you one. It's parked on the road for you." It's not a gift exactly, and suddenly I'm saddled by a car payment. My idea of paradise is her idea of hell and needs corrrecting. I get in the car and instead of a steeringwheel, it's got a long sundial-y needle and I've got to figure out how to drive this thing. I look around for the rabbit and it's gone.

Last night I dreamed I was living in an upstairs apartment, and my ex-husband came over to put in a carpet for me. He did a good job, except he made a record (vinyl) sleeve-sized hole in the floor. I could look down the hole and see a gaggle of Catholic school girls in their uniforms in the apartment below me. I didn't want to see them, so I made a box 2 inches high, stuck it in the hole, filled it with dirt, and planted seeds in it. The seeds sprang to life immediately, and the box was filled with green thick grass.

This morning on Remembrance Day I dreamed that I could hide it no longer.

I went to the dentist and told her that I had a hole in my top right incisor, a huge hole, nearly half the tooth.

The dentist had previously attended to the bottom row of my teeth, but for some reason she never looked to the top.

She started to scrape away at the cavity without comment. This surprised me. I had expected much sighing, ooh-ing and aa-hing, at the sight of the hole. But she merely set about the task of cleaning out and then refilling it.

‘I can’t quite get the colour match right,’ she said at one point and showed me a small ball of putty, the stuff she was using to fill my tooth. It looked almost brown and when I saw my newly filled tooth in the mirror, the difference between the old and the new was obvious.

‘I’ll have to leave it as it is till next time you come,’ the dentist said.

I left the surgery, wondering whether I had the courage to alert her to a second large hole further along the row of my front teeth near my right molars.

How would she react to that? I wondered.

Uuuuuugh. A tall ocean resort building with the guard rail missing at the very end of the top floors row of rooms. I'm in the distance,trudging down a path,a corridor excavated thru a graveyard. I see in the distance a guy my age obliviously riding his bike -hes high up and moving fast,headed towards the end of the unprotected balcony. I see he will plummet 17 floors to the parking lot below.my trudging attempts to hurry in what is now mud. My stomach hurts with a burning nausea. From the soft earthy walls around me a shifting takes place and mud falls away, revealing the lolling vomiting head of a corpse.

I run to a clearing where I catch up with a band of hero friends.mutants or d n d characters. One is short and smal with ropes and leather pouches.another appears to be bigfoot. (Not chewbacca-Bigfoot) the leader is the dr.jones type mixed with a Stryder type. I am a basic brawny warrior generic holds his own guy. Below us electric blue water refracts in sequenced sharp triangles-like the blue in the jungle boy listerine commercial from the 80's. We are in a jungle. A small island with agile monkey siren-esque females prance and let their long mocha brown body hair flow in strong winds. They are human in an appealing way and they call to us. The water around them jumps with zebra striped pirahna.

The leader of our group uses a rope from nowhere to show it will be our way to swing across the gorge. I know without knowing that the rope is a test of will (spiritual shit) not a physical challenge. The bigfoot makes the swing across,with monkey women sirens and evil teethed zebra fish taunting from below. I'm reminded of atreyu and the sphinx with the lazer eyes.
The leader swings across with ease then throws me the rope.
He yells.
"Remember the number..."
And then he yelled a number I can't recall.
It was then that I woke up.

This woman is explaining how it works to me. She hits some preset button and the walls are showing us that time when she lived at the beach. I can smell fried chicken. The furniture in the room is now seemingly the furniture at that beach-house she told me about. I spot some artificial chicken on an artificial grill. Then I see the woman as a hologram now, running, laughing from the sea toward the house. ( . . . ) The woman is explaining to me how to use the machine. I must know the date and location. I wrack my brains. I am very bad at remembering dates. ______ was always good at that and she made me a file once with all the important dates in our relationship. But I take a guess and try to find the trip to asheville n.c. (when she first said she loved me). I put a date in and I see many small screens inside this phonebooth-like machine. None of them shows me anything I recognize. But then I look out at the walls in the larger room and I see something I know. This is a civil war diorama or something and I remember being there with ______ and then the room is changing to match the projections on the walls and I am looking around everywhere for ______. Then I see her and myself as well and we are walking side by side and I am talking to her, telling a story it looks like, and she is smiling at me and so beautiful and I have not seen her in so very long, the 'me' watching this in the dream falls to his knees and weeps and the woman in the dream rushes to turn off the machine and "I" want to yell to her not to, to *please* let it play on...
[I wake, sobbing, in my bed]

On my way home. On foot. On the wrong road. A sudden steep climb. Hands and knees. The road ends at the mouth of a cave. Inside the cave, a colorful framed painting on the wall. A button to press — an old brown coat button. The painting slides up. Behind it, a young man leaning over a narrow table. Test tubes. Board games. Dice. He looks up, says, “I will call him.” He goes. Returns, followed by another young man. Both are grinning. I think, “Oh, no, they want to sell me something.” Quickly, I press the button. The painting slides back into place just as they start their song and dance. Literally.

In the public library, the woman whose catalogue raisonnée of Kurt Schwitters had gone largely ignored generously agreed to my request for one of the large fabric banners upon which Tony Dohr's words of praise for the project were emblazoned. She regarded me patiently as I failed to fold it neatly, and accepted my offer of help carrying a carton of books to her car with an air just faintly scented by flirtation, understood by both of us to be retractable at any moment. Her next project, she thought she'd surprise me by saying, would be on Jack Spicer.

It's the nineteenth century, and I've been cast in a play representing the workings of nature. There are hundreds of other actresses in the play, but we haven't been given our parts yet. The director sends us into a room with rows of soft, colorful nightgowns and tells us to change, leaving our corsets behind. Many of the women are nervous and uncomfortable with this costuming, but I'm looking forward to wearing something less restrictive. I choose a long blue nightgown and put it on behind a curtain. I'm thinking I'm going to be cast as Neptune, because of the color of my costume, but the director sees me and says "Dawn. Definitely Dawn," and sends me off to rehearse.

I go into a darkened room where all I can make out is a cloth draped over something vaguely human-shaped. I crawl underneath and find another woman in a blue gown, who tells me we're to represent Dawn together. She hands me a flashlight-shaped thing, which I turn on. Beautiful colored lights come from it, and my partner tells me that when our cue comes we're to turn these on and sing a song. I say I haven't learned the song, and she tells me it goes "ooooo, DAWN!" I try to sing that but she keeps correcting me--I can't get it right. She says not to worry, all we really have to do is sing along with a recording--she shows me a device that apparently has the song on it. I ask if I can listen to it, in order to learn the song, but she says we're not to turn it on until our cue, because it's very loud. I ask what IS our cue, and she doesn't answer.

We sit in silence for a while. I'm dying to hear the song. Trying to make it look like an accident, I turn on the device. "Ooooo, DAWN!" goes the device, and it is, indeed, very loud. My partner is panicking, and we try to muffle the sound with pillows, but it's too late--the director is upon us. He knows I was the one who turned on the song, and he asks me to go with him into another room. "Do you see why I asked that you not turn that on until your cue?" he asks. I say I do, and apologize. All along he's been very gruff and intimidating, but now he takes me in his arms and kisses the top of my head. I'm overcome by a feeling of complete peace.

He walks me back to my place, which is now on a hill under the stars. No sooner am I there than my partner and I hear our cue, and we turn on the device and our flashlights and begin singing. It's joyful! Together we walk down the hill. We see the actresses playing animals and planets and Greek deities, all beautifully costumed and dancing, and I'm singing at the top of my lungs "ooooo, DAWN," and that is when I wake up laughing.

I have been away in the country for a few days and I’m driving my husband’s car, mindful the whole time that I must take good care of it. I park it by the side of the road near the hotel in which I’m staying.

It is nearly time to go home. I am now inside the hotel packing to leave. I am having trouble fitting all my belongings into my suitcase. Somehow I have been left with other people’s stuff, bulky jumpers and scarves that one of my companions, a woman has decided not to pack into her own suitcase. In the bathroom I find signs of my husband’s left over toiletries. I wonder whether I should pack these, too, but I can barely find room in my own case for all my stuff.

Instinctively I know there is something amiss with my husband’s car. I go outside to see it careering down the road driverless. I have been aware of this, that in certain unpredictable circumstances the car can take off by itself. Still, I wonder whether one of my daughters has played with the ignition and accidentally started it. I chase after the car hoping to reach it somehow and then stop it, even though I know this impossible. The car turns a corner and is out of sight. I call out to some men in a field nearby and ask for their help. We race across the field in the hope that we might cut the car off, assuming it continues to follow the road.

Under a row of eucalypts on the other side of the field we watch as cars rush past. I cannot see my husband’s car and wonder whether it has already crashed.

And there it is, worse for wear, the whole side panel bashed in, the front crumpled. It looks as though it is running out of puff now. It leaves the road and rides up into an embankment where it collides with a row of small bushes. I imagine that we might be able to fix it but I will need to tell my husband first.

Then I am at an exhibition of racing cars. A small child, perhaps one of my daughters, sits inside the cockpit of one of these cars. It is a toy car with metal pedals inside, the sort that existed when I was a child. The little girl is trying to work out how to get the car going. People mill about to watch. All seems calm and yet I sense at any moment this car too might suddenly spring to life of its own accord and take the girl with it.

Last night I dreamed I was at the grocery store and Paris, a very skinny and active cat, was in the basket. His legs kept going through the holes in the basket. I was trying to find food that wouldn't make me ill and trying to keep Paris in the basket at the same time. I found some bananas and wheeled the basket outside where Paris leapt free and was immediately cornered by a huge hairy beast of an animal. The animal was the size of an adult raccoon but covered in matted fur and spikes and had the long sharply curved teeth of a rat. It was wearing a pink studded collar and had a pet tag around its neck. Paris was ready to tangle but I managed to grab him and hold him tightly and the beast lumbered off.

In the dream someone smoking or eating [?] Moncatels. Your search - moncatels -

did not match any documents.

Philip Dadson back from New York brought with him a new improved amazing

way of printing out from computers, a long white rectangular stick that he pressed

onto paper briefly. How did that work?

I dreamed this morning that I had decided to sell up in the city and move to the country. I planned to sell my half of the house here in Hawthorn and buy a property in Maldon. I would share this new property with D, an old acquaintance, but D is someone about whom I have mixed feelings. In some ways I’d go so far as to say I hate her. Certainly my decision to sell up my shared house with my husband seemed to be fuelled by my anger towards him and I was aware in the dream of wanting to live two lives, one here, one there.

I went to look at a house that was up for sale in country Maldon. An elderly couple currently occupied it. They agreed to let me look through – large rooms, high ceilings and the smell of new mown hay. The rooms in this house seemed to run on forever, huge rooms with wood panelling half way up the walls and pressed steel in places down the hall way. It had been cobbled together from a variety of different styles. None of the furniture was consistent, a bit like the house of one of my daughter’s boyfriends, which I had visited yesterday. This boy’s parents own a huge retro and antique furniture business to which their house is testimony. Their house, too, like the house in my dream, like the house in which I live now is cluttered, and full of stuff.

There were so many signs of life here in this house in Maldon and so little room for putting things away. I loved this house, which I toyed with buying but in my dream it became evident that I had a debt I would not be able to honour. The debt was a hidden debt of $300,00.00 and unbeknown to me it would sit hidden for three years and eventually the bank would call it in.

The daughter of a friend came into my dream then. She seemed distressed. She was followed shortly after by two of the staff from Bunnings, a hardware store chain. They complained that they had found in her car goods that she had taken from one of their stores without paying.

‘Give them the $13.00,’ I said. ‘Just pay them.’

She fumbled in her purse and as she did so I took the money from mine and paid these two men, who took then took the money and walked out without so much as a glance back.

I went to a reunion of ‘old girls’ at Vaucluse, my senior school. I travelled through the grounds with one of my younger sisters who had also attended the school, one year below me. At one point we decided to travel down a long chute. It would be steep, I thought, like going down a slide in the park; only this one was long. I could almost feel my body torn apart in anticipation of the speed, but once inside the chute we slid down gracefully, not too fast as I had feared, but comfortably as if there were some traction between our bums and the surface of the tunnel. It was made of blue plastic.

After we landed at the bottom we stood inside a small room at whose centre stood a table covered in a fancy silk cloth. Another girl, who also once went to our school, a girl who had boarded with me, whose name was the same as that of my sister, soon followed us. But this girl was big, whereas my sister now and in the dream is and was pretzel thin.

There was a note pad on the table that included names and addresses. I flicked through it hoping to find a sign of my favourite nun from school days. But her name was not there.

Then I was inside a church with a gathering of ‘old girls’ from my class. A few recognised me but no one seemed interested in taking time to talk to me beyond an initial hello. I looked at the faces of these ‘old girls’. I peered through the present into the past, past layers of wrinkles and grey hair, to find the girls I might remember.

I was desperate to find someone who had been meaningful to me when I was at school, but before I knew it I was preparing for the train trip home. The train took ages to arrive. After I had stepped inside, it took even more time to assemble itself for the trip. Seats folded and unfolded, panels snapped open and shut, as of they were orchestrated by some invisible machine.

Once it took off the train travelled fast, so fast that some people, including me were thrown out of their seats. My body bashed up against a partition midway through the carriage and I held onto a couple of small children who had also been flung from their seats. When the train reached its destination I realised we were back where we had started.

The weather had turned foul by now, with sleet and rain bordering on snow. It was dark and freezing cold. I tried to walk across the mud to the next train. Three other trains arrived at the same time. I had no idea which one to take.

I could not get traction in the mud and seemed to be walking without getting anywhere. Someone hoisted me up onto the train, but I realised almost immediately that I was on the wrong train yet again. I woke up breathless.

Several of my friends, who are suddenly much older, have been summoned to “the war.” It breaks my heart to see them as they arrive one by one, uprooted from their families, lives, and cares, to receive their orders and gear. One with whom I’m very close stops at a little wooden booth called the “supply depot,” but the only supplies left are pencils. He takes an unsharpened one from the counter, then turns and looks my way. His questioning expression reminds me that I’m supposed to accompany him to the train, which I haven’t seen, but imagine as a human cattle car like those Solzhenitsyn described in The Gulag Archipelago. But instead of showing him the way, I lead him out into a field of bones, thinking, “Someday, someone, somewhere, has to say no.”

Home is a strange place, my father here, alive again, knee-deep in a pile of leaves. Angles and eaves and broken-down tables; shadows on paths through the trees. I want to smoke, but each match is snuffed by the breeze. The book falls apart in my hand. I notice a car in the yard. My father is behind the wheel. I slide in on the passenger side. The dash is alive, a futuristic arrangement of buttons and blinking lights. One of them is white — much to my surprise, it’s a cigarette lighter. In my father’s hand, the end of it burns like a star. I hold up a large uncured tobacco leaf. Night intervenes; with an old rag, he wipes a constellation from the windshield.

aaargh the dreams... was about to fly off to Japan with G. for some reason the airport was on the lower east side near delancey street... I stopped in a little store to buy some olive oil... why would I need to bring olive oil? and then remembered I hadn't brought my cell phone or charger...so back to some apartment... not ours... but we'd been staying there... almost no furniture... an apparition slipped in... female, I think... maybe a homeless person using the bathroom... although too much like an apparition to actually use a bathroom... and then she slipped out again... and then I realized... Gary was nowhere to be seen... the flight was leaving in a half an hour... I still didn't have my cellphone... I thought OK I'll rent one... but where was Gary?... I noticed the olive oil was dark, like unprocessed argan oil...

I dreamed:

Barrelhouse Dave was pissed about a blog post I wrote about Barrelhouse. He told me to stop trying to be funny and stick to writing about "minor" poetry

of a woman poet who wore blue face make-up

I downloaded a bunch of scary/Halloween movies to watch with Chris, but there was only one he was willing to see

I made up with a writer with who I recently had an icky interaction

An editor from the West Wind Review accepted my poems and suggested I use the nickname "Sous Rature." Then my sister told me that's a stupid idea and I shouldn't.

In my dream, I'm playing tennis and break a string in my racquet (in my actual life, I've NEVER broken a string - not once). I go into my tennis bag and pull out my other stick, and the strings in that racquet have turned into limp spaghetti. I decide to find my old racquets and all their strings are in some state of unplayable fray. I'm supposed to play a match...

Also, as part of the "find my old tennis racquets" section of the dream, I discover that we have entirely new and enormous rooms of the house and barn I've never seen before that are filled with someone else's stuff.

I recently had a dream that was so vivid it left me seeing ghosts everywhere (in a good way). I dreamt that I took a walk along the familiar downtown streets of my hometown, Lewiston, Maine (I'd just been reading and researching historical sites, old industrial era mills, etc.) and suddenly there was a suspension of time as we know it. As I walked along a familiar sidewalk in the present, everyone who'd ever walked down that street at any given time in the past were walking their routes too, at the same time. The layers of activity created a bustling scene, yet everyone was somewhat transparent and able to walk through one another without interruption or notice. The longer ago the person walked the route, the fainter their image. I crossed paths with old relatives and loved ones departed while in their youths. I called to them without connecting, but felt the comfort of their presence, nonetheless. I specifically remember walking alongside my Uncle Larry, my father's older brother who died in 1945 in Belgium during WWII. I never met him, but have heard enough about him to realize that I'd have loved to have had my Uncle Larry to enjoy and grow up knowing. I just savored walking with him. I couldn't reach him to speak with, but his presence was a comfort. Since that dream I have a hard time looking at things as separate from the past. I also know, as a consequence that my own footprints resonate into the future and affect its outcome, even if ever so subtly. Uncle Larry, because of who he was and his interactions with his brother (my father), Claude and countless others, played a role in shaping who I am. There cannot help but be a resonating influence, even if a very subtle one. I learned that while dreaming and awaking to a new understanding. That is also what art at its best should do: awaken us to new understandings. I think a great work of art should invite the viewer to places completely unknown, yet mysteriously familiar. What comes from the subconscious, or dream state is the stuff of universal truths because it has no agenda except to become known.

In last night's dream, Alli & I were in conflict.
There was the appearance of a formula around which our argument circulated; it was this:



x [ or else = or ≠ ]



Cute cues, but it was a bad dream.

I go with my husband to visit our new flat some ten minutes away from where we live. We still possess our ordinary large house, as it is now where we live with three of our four children though one of them, the youngest instead of being fifteen years old in the dream is still a baby on the brink of walking. The flat that we will soon occupy – only my husband and I for short spells, for the occasional weekend or at nights during the week when my husband cannot stand the pressure of life at home any longer – is in a state of incompleteness. There are boxes stacked one above the other, some opened and some minus half their contents, in almost every room. It has a living-out-of-a-suitcase feel.

That’s okay I think because we will never live here. It’s just an occasional escape from the rigours of ordinary home life. Of course we must take the baby with us. We cannot leave her at home alone, even with her older sisters. The flat has two storeys and already I worry about how she will manage the stairs.

At one stage I start to walk around the flat in the company of a friend and neighbour. I offer her the grand tour. By the time we reach the upstairs bedroom I realise how unliveable this place is. We cannot sleep here. The beds are disassembled. Even the packages of tea on the kitchen sink are still sealed in hard-to-get-at boxes.

We plan to take a bus back home but we are not sure how to get there. Then we are in the car and I urge my husband to follow the blue Ventura bus. It goes to the school, and once we arrive at the school we will recognise where we are. We follow the bus past the schoolyard, which has been cleaned up and extended over the holidays. The back of the schoolyard beyond the classroom buildings extends down some way into a gully. It slopes in stages with a couple of long cliff like drops onto flat grassy plateaux.

How can they allow children to get to such steep ridges? I wonder. This schoolyard is dangerous.

I wake up.

Voices wake me. I roll out of bed, slip my shoes on, follow the sound outside. A fine summer night. Stars and a bright full moon. The garage door is open. I move through the garage to the back door. The voices are coming from the other side. I open the door, step out, and the door bumps shut behind me.

Two of my neighbors—two women—are finishing a conversation. They don't greet or even look at me, but the mood isn't unfriendly. They're cheerful because of the children. Down the mountain (a strange mountain, not the one we really live on) I can see half a dozen young ones playing hide-and-seek among the trees.

One of the women says some kind of goodbye to her friend (I can't make out the words) and sets off down the steep slope. She disappears into the forest. I can hear her calling the children home. The other woman heads off the other way, up the mountain. She doesn't speak or glance my way. I don't feel slighted, just pleasantly invisible. The mountainside sloping up from where I stand looks strange: a series of circular stone terraces with stone steps spiraled around them. My neighbor must climb the steps to move from one terrace to the next. She appears and disappears as she climbs, dwindling with each higher terrace, until she's out of sight. I look back down the mountain: no one. The black pines look intensely distinct in the strong moonlight. The stars overhead seem larger than usual and oddly active—quivering or writhing. I feel completely alone and a little afraid. "Time for bed," I tell myself out loud.

The door back into the garage is locked, so I decide to go around the house and come in through the side door. But when I clear the corner of the garage I see this isn't my house. I'm on a flagstone terrace. The sliding door a few feet away is open. In a state of confusion, as if to verify that this is really not my house, I slip through the sliding door and into an unfamiliar living room or den. From a tiled entryway across the room a staircase climbs in my direction and vanishes into the ceiling. Off to the left there's a shadowy kitchen. The only light comes from a narrow trapezoid of moonlight on the carpet. I move toward the stairway, wondering if anyone's home and if they might be sleeping upstairs. I slide my left hand along the wall that encloses the space under the stairs, feeling for a light switch.

From behind me comes a man's voice—strong but not fearless. "What are you doing in my house?" I try to turn and face him, but can't: I feel almost paralyzed. I try to say it's just me but my throat too is paralyzed. So I keep inching my way along the wall as if he might not notice. The man, voice rising in pitch with each word, calls out behind me, "I have a gun!" I keep inching forward until I reach the foot of the stairs, where I stop. Across the entryway I see the light switch glowing beside the front door.

Suddenly I feel completely empty—a profound resignation. I know I'll never be able to reach that switch.

Peter Lamborn Wilson wants to visit an out-of-the-way place called Mud Bay, where there's an island inhabited by rare auks, and possibly visited by Crowley before. We can't find it on the map, but we (Robert, Peter, and I) manage to locate it on GPS and drive to a gloomy-looking bay that looks like it might be near Providence. There's a ferry once a day that goes to the island. When we get there we see nothing but wasteland, a wide lane that seems to lead nowhere, a few low buildings in the distance. The inhabitants all seem to have octopus heads covered by masks in the shape of human faces, but that doesn't alarm us much. I spend the rest of the dream trying to leave the island, trying to convince Peter that we don't really need to see the auks.

Last night I had two dreams. The first one I dreamed that Gideon opened a box and let out all the animal-flies. The crocodile-fly grew full size and bit my arm. Crocodiles and snakes occasionally bite me in dreams, so I'm kinda used to it. My second dream was about writing poems again. The first one was long and ended with an exclamation to Harriet! I was quite emphatic about that. Then I started my second poem, something about that story being over in my life.

In my dream last night we were traveling through strange parts of the countryside, a long way from home. Rocky gullies, deep valleys, overflowing waterfalls. At one point we met up with my oldest daughter, her partner and their two-year-old son.

We were in a bazaar buying jewelery. I pointed out to my daughter some of the extraordinary and cheap earrings that hung from a wall, when her son fell over. He fell heavily and the impact of the fall made his head fall off. I could only bear to look for an instant but I knew he had been decapitated, the blood a trickle from his headless neck. I looked away and was swallowed up with grief.

Last night I dreamed that I was getting a tattoo of a famous actor, a woman, but I was uncomfortable with it because I knew I didn’t really like her. But I was committed to the tattoo and felt I had to go forward with it. Luckily my tattoo artist refused me the tattoo and I was grateful. I can’t remember who she was.

In my second dream I was in school studying writing. Reb Livingston was my professor. She gave me a task of collating a bunch of manuscripts. Each manuscript was divided by a beautiful bookmark that Reb had made herself out of silk. Reb went home and I was there with another student. For some reason I got panicky and lost track of all the pieces of paper. Pages went missing. Bookmarks slid from one manuscript to another until they were all a mess. The other student, a blond woman, asked if I wanted to go to a party. We got in her car and she told me that she had read my diary and hated my writing. I yelled at her YOU READ MY DIARY? And she told me to get out of her car. I didn’t care that she hated my writing, but was horrified that she had invaded my privacy. I walked back to the school to fix the mess I had made of my task and there was a young man my son’s age asleep in the corner. He asked me if I wanted a glass of wine. He had the key to Reb’s desk. We opened it and found two beautiful hand blown goblets, a kind of pale rose color, and a bottle of wine. We started drinking and he told me that everyone in the class had read my diary, that it had been passed around in derision. Then he told me he was homeless so I invited him to live at my house for 3 months. I told him he was my son’s age and we didn’t have much money but we had a spare room in the basement and he would be warm and have food to eat etc. He gave me his father’s phone number so I could call and tell his father our plan but every time I dialed I got the wrong number.

In my dream I go to visit a doctor. Whatever I have gone to visit her about, she decides to use the opportunity for giving me a thorough examination. She takes my temperature, my blood pressure and examines my breasts. I am confident she will find nothing wrong but on first count she thinks she has detected ‘sclerosis’, she says, or some such thing. She pummels my left breast again and decides that no, she is wrong. It’s okay. Then she has me standing erect, naked and seems to be bouncing me up and down with her hand on my buttocks. I think she is checking for a prolapse or some such thing. She continues to examine me in the way some doctors do with no explanation as to the whys or wherefore of her approach.

I stand there meekly obedient even though I long for it all to be over. At one point I look towards the open doorway and notice my regular GP walk past. I have decided not to see this GP anymore.

For some reason whenever I go to see this particular doctor I feel guilty as if I have been bad – I have drunk too much wine, my diet is improper, I work too hard, am too irreligious – and I imagine she will scold me for it. In real life she never does this, but in my imagination she is constantly scolding me. In my dream I have taken action by deciding against seeing her anymore. My regular GP’s offsider, the one I am with now, is younger, younger even than me, but she does not leave me feeling guilty. She seems more down to earth, even as she examines me in this painstaking way. I feel less intimidated, more equal.

‘My patients are leaving me,’ I hear my regular GP say to her assistant as she walks past the open door. She looks in as she says this and looks directly at me. Our eyes lock and almost instantly I lose my balance and must spin around in order to save myself from falling.

‘I did not jerk away like that to avoid you,’ I say, as I regain my footing.

I feel a need to apologise but this is as much as I can say.

Then I am in the car park at the doctor’s surgery. I have offered to give my new doctor a lift home. She is eager to see her children. The car park is a mess of broken concrete and unmade roads. There is a traffic jam in the middle and I have trouble finding my car in the first instance and then of getting it out of the car park. Somehow I manage to do this and we are no longer in a car but on a train.

Flashback in my dream to a visit from an exchange student, a lovely girl from some place like France or Germany. She is puzzled by my family’s eccentricities, the way we lead such a chaotic life, irregular meals and odd ours. We sit in the back yard and a delivery man comes to drop off a machine my husband had ordered earlier but as he leaves he puts down a row of miniature figurines, characters from television and fairy tales – Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. I would like to keep these characters but I know they are not free. ‘

‘They are a seduction,’ I tell the girl. ‘The deliveryman put them there to get us to buy more.’

The exchange student decides she will take the train on her next journey and that she will sit on the train on the outside ledge where other passengers sit. I warn her that it is dangerous there. I see her on the train now clutching her suitcase in front.

‘It’s fine,’ she says, cheerfully. ‘There’s plenty of room.’ She is squeezed in like a sardine alongside several other passengers all nursing their luggage.

‘It won’t be so easy once the train gets going,’ I say. ‘It will wobble and jerk you all over the place.’

As the train takes off I see her in my mind’s eye. She has become me and I am desperately trying to keep my bottom perched safely on the narrow ledge. It is only a matter of time before I will be pitched off from the speeding train.

Our team of medieval warfare scholars is hiking across a European landscape. Coming over the crest of a hill, we all see the body of a 13th-century peasant woman, blond, wearing course but clean clothing and a snowy apron, her arms and legs extended cross-like, murdered, her hands and feet severed, her tongue cut out. She is young, pretty, her face calm. We all hover around the body, searching for clues, and all the other scholars, simultaneously, decide she represents a medieval murder that should be filed under "H"--I suppose that this is because of the symmetry of the butchery. I'm standing by her head, and I look out over her feet and notice, in the distance, an old tree that's been blasted by some storm, its roots torn out of the ground, hanging naked in the air. "Look over there," I say, pointing, and all the medieval scholars gasp and take off running towards this new clue, which appears to be much more "significant" than a murdered and mutilated peasant woman. The scholars enter a heated debate over what sort of tree this is, the exact trajectory of the tree trunk (north-north-west, or north-west-west?), the causative event (earthquake? storm? war? supernatural force?). "H" is left far behind; this new event merits a "V", a "W", possibly even an "X". The scholars argue passionately, pacing around the huge felled tree. I realize that this is the sort of event is what they long for, an event that is much more mysterious than the mundane ritual murder of the peasant woman. The tree has druid connotations; it's ancient. Indeed, the death of this gorgeous old tree--either through natural or human means--fills me with deep sorrow while the discovery of the peasant woman's body only made me feel a little sad.

On the morning of my presentation at a life writing conference called The Story of the Story I had a dream that felt so real it still seems as though it actually happened. I dreamed that when it came time for me to present my paper in the Noel Stockdale room within the library at Flinders University I went ahead of the others to set up and to tweak my paper for the last time.

In my dream an old friend, who is now dead, LB was the conference convenor. LB once lectured me in psychology. He was born around the same time as my father.

People had already arrived in time for the third day of the conference to begin. They sat in rows faces turned towards the front in readiness. LB asked me to start. Some people were still rustling papers and chatting to one another, so I had to repeat my first sentence. Then I started fumbling my words. I lost my place on the page and could not find it for what seemed like ages. People shifted in their seats and began to talk among one another. I could not regain their attention. I tried from the beginning and spoke loudly but my words would not flow.

I had rehearsed and rehearsed. I had tried hard. Now here it was: my turn to present, my turn at last, last speaker of the conference, and I could not get the audience to listen.

I tried to catch LB’s eye, to plead with him to get the audience to settle, but he would not look at me. The people in the audience then seemed to lose patience altogether and before I knew it they had decided to break for morning tea.

I had lost my opportunity to present. It had passed without my saying a word of what I needed to say. I was devastated and stood at the podium in tears. There was a small group of people nearby, the ones with whom I had shared a car en route to the conference. They ignored me, too. I was furious, but flooded with tears.

In my dream LB had become a medical doctor not just a PhD. I wailed to a woman nearby about how unfair he had been in not insisting to the audience that I be allowed to have my turn. I had tried so hard to prepare and now no one wanted to hear from me.

I woke sobbing and nothing felt as if it would ever be any good again.

The railway platform

His face was distorted with painful efforts to smile. ‘Don’t move’ I said to him ‘I have seen you somewhere.’

He did not speak just let out a lacerated laughter. ‘ Are you dead or alive?’ I asked and looked around in fear. The railway platform was dark and deserted, not even a single lamp was lighted. No one was around. I looked back at the form lying huddled on the rough, stained floor. ‘I am alive, but I died very long ago.’ He said in muffled tones.

The porter arrived with my bag, my red bag with blue logo. I almost grabbed the bag from his hands and tried to get up from the floor where I was sitting on my hunches, talking to the sleeping man. I could not stand up on my legs and I groped in the dark, to look for my feet. The porter shook his head in sadness and walked away. His fire engine red uniform was glowing in the dark. I saw a flash of steel badge on his sleeve. He raised his arm to stop an approaching train. The train stopped.

He turned back to beckon at me. He told me with hand and facial gestures that the train would not stop for long. I must get up and board it as fast as I can. My bag was not there. The man was still lying on the ground, and I looked around for my bag.

‘Have you seen my bag?’ I asked, as I looked around frantically. The platform was pitch dark and the train had begun to move slowly.

The porter in red uniform was running his fingers along the moving body of the train, walking leisurely, while the train chugged along. I watched him count the numbers on his other hand. One, two, three…

He was smiling.

I wanted to run and catch the train but it had left the platform. There were just long, winding lines of shining grey steel, running parallel to each other, with sharp pebbles in between. A few feet away from me, my bag was lying open on an iron bench. I saw huge bundles of paper, peeping out from the half open zip.

‘How did you open it?’ I asked the man who was still lying on the ground, his face buried in the crook of his arm. He refused to answer me and I was feeling angry with him. I wanted to shake him up but my hands and feet were just hanging by my side. The darkness grew.

‘Okay, I want to wake up now. I want to go home.’ I said to the porter in red uniform, who was silently putting all the papers back in the bag.

I had to get on a barge that was filled with people who had to euthanize their pets. We steamed out into the middle of the ocean, and each of us had to jump overboard and drown our pet. I jumped into the ocean with Shadow, and every time I tried to drown him, his head would pop out of the water, and he'd smile that dog smile of his and sort of laugh as if to tell me, "That was so much fun! Let's do that again!"

It's the future and I have am in some gray industrial zone where I've been recruited, inducted, assigned to a work force for a nuclear plant. My job is to climb a wooden scaffolding and then dive off a platform and descend through a transparent tube filled with steam down through a vat of water. I do this over and over. At some point I am looking at the diving platform apparatus from a distance and start to have a realization of why have I been assigned to this task? Then, these Sovietesque ladies in charge start questioning me about the temperature of the water in the vat. There is a panic that a nuclear fission has occurred. If the water is cold, then its a fusion reaction. The water was tepid and someone is saying this is relatively "good" indication as we are all running and panicking away from the site. We end up in a public space room in a Central Park like area and I realize that a small camera mounted on a pole (as there are all over NYC, of course) is a surveillance camera. Am filled with dread. With a group of strangers in the dark am wading through a ravine or extended buried pipe in the park which is clogged. Sense of continuous and detailed considerations with these people about whom to trust in this situation. Wake up wondering if the Iranians have disclosed about their nuclear explorations as a "cry for help," from a faction within the government.

This morning I dreamt I went to visit the house of some friends. It was an unusual house in that there was a long low movable wall around its perimeter. At several points in the wall there were gaps to take the place of doors. You could move this wall with a simple push and get the openings to fit to the door of each room in the house. It was like opening the lid of a pepper dispenser. You push the lid around and different size holes become available depending on whether you want a light sprinkling of pepper or a great handful.

My friend’s daughter was in her room. I call him my friend but he’s more my husband’s friend. I have an ambivalent relationship with my husband’s friend, but somehow my feelings about him did not feature in the dream nor my feelings about his daughter, who is a strange person I find in real life, though in the dream she seemed normal.

She had gone to a great deal of trouble to tidy her room and yet I noticed the drawers were bulging and stuff peeped out through the cracks of the wardrobes as if she had simply stuffed things inside willy-nilly. There was a false sense of order here.

My youngest daughter who in the dream was still a toddler joined us. A carefree, cheerful toddler. Then a little ball of fur on legs walked across the room. It looked innocent enough and I asked my friend’s daughter what it was.

‘Stay away from them,’ she said. ‘They’re trouble.’ The ball of fur suddenly let out a spray of the foulest stench imaginable into the room and we all reeled back.

‘That’s what they do,’ my friend’s daughter said. ‘And if they manage to get some of that stink on you, it sticks for ages.’

I swooped up my daughter and tried to escape the monstrous ball of fur, which I felt sure was getting ready to spray us again.

The doors slid around the room and my friend, my husband’s friend arrived, all bluster and swagger. He remonstrated with his daughter for keeping the walls fixed in one place. He had had trouble getting in.

I was aware as if in a flash that there were other dangers lurking here in this oddly designed house and I must be careful.

It is very early in the morning, in the hour or so before dawn. I hear Moonie meowing and scratching at the door, so I roll out of bed and go downstairs to let him in. The light is dim, yet through the glass door I can see that he is not alone: a handsome sliver-grey wolf stands nose-to-nose with him on the deck by the door. Although he doesn't appear threatened by the wolf's presence - indeed, they seem merely to be checking one another out - the thrill of seeing a wolf at my door is tempered with some concern for Moon. Careful not to make any sudden movements, I go quietly to the door and crack it open just enough to let him slip through. I look at the wolf for a moment, then open the door further, sit on the stoop and extend my hand. The wolf is wild, and I am not afraid. He licks my fingers delicately, then I begin to pet him. Everything in my house and outside looks exactly as it does in waking life, yet as I pet the wolf I begin to wonder if this is all happening in a dream. If so, I want it to continue. I awaken here in the pre-dawn light.

I had a dream once that I had a Bukowski rug on the floor, and each time I got broke, all I had to do was reach into the mouth and some money would come out of the rug—the Bukowski rug.


—Excerpt from "Charles Bukowski love letters sold, maybe more," by juston Berton, San Francisco Chronicle, Sept 18, 2009

Anne Gorrick and I were riding around in a small, slow-moving, blimp-like airplane, circling Manhattan, looking for a place to land. I was concerned about maneuvering the plane in between buildings, but Anne seemed totally confident and relaxed about it (she was the pilot). As we started to descend, it occurred to me, and so I said to her, “. . .you know, I think one is supposed to have a license to drive an airplane.” And then: “what should we say when the air traffic controllers call?”

In my dream I am traveling on a plane, which later becomes a train. While the plane is in the air someone takes it into his head to shoot a couple of the passengers. Their bodies lie inert on the floor between the rows of seats. No one seems perturbed but I over hear the plane’s captain. He is angry and wants to land as soon as possible.

The plane becomes a train. It rattles its way through the countryside and I can see the broken rocks of the mountains through which we travel.

There is a group of people on the verge of a green hill. They are dressed up in readiness for a wedding. I have not been invited to this wedding but somehow I mingle with them. It starts to rain, trickles at first then great torrents. A small group of us head for the shelter of a tree whose branches are dome shaped, as if we were standing underneath an umbrella. The rain gets so heavy eventually it soaks through the branches.

I take out my red umbrella and offer to share it with a woman whose hair is beginning to lose its pre-wedding curl. I feel sorry for her. She has gone to some trouble to prepare for this wedding and now she begins to look like a sodden dog. I offer to make room for another man underneath the canopy of the tree but there is scarcely room for the three of us.

I am inside a house now with a friend, someone who has also been invited to the wedding and a couple of her friends. They are preparing a dish to take to the wedding. I offer to help. My friend is enthusiastic about my offer but the other woman in the couple is not. She barely speaks to me as I go about offering ideas on how best to cook the lump of meat they have placed in a shallow baking dish. I take a bottle of milk from the fridge and prepare to pour it into the base of the dish. This is the best way, I say, to stop it from drying out. My friend is impressed. Her friend, the other woman, is not and says as much.

‘I’ll be off then,’ I say and flounce out. The front door slams behind me.

The two women follow. On the nature strip my friend apologises but her friend says nothing.

‘You are the rudest person I have ever met,’ I say to my friend’s friend. ‘I was only trying to help.’

I tried to close my eyes and my eyelids refused to budge. They were heavy and unmoving as if a scrap of steel is fixed over my eyeballs. The apparition was sitting across the table with a knife in one hand and a bunch of drying flowers in another.

There was a wilting, stale looking cake lying on the table, with chocolate icing that appeared to me as if brown wax has been poured over the creamy mound. The apparition smiled. My smile. It waved the knife in the air and said. ‘Let’s cut this cake.’ I saw my silver bracelet on its arm. A tiny sparkle caught the light above. The eyes were mine too. The face took a shape right before my eyes, like a swift, deft stroke of an artist’s sketch. It was me I was looking at. Sitting across me, not smiling, not seeing. Just looking. I could feel the goose pimples on my arms. A chill ran through my spine.

‘I am not you.’ I tried to scream and it came from her mouth. I watched my words flowing out from her lips. ‘I am not you’, like someone mocking me. Imitating my voice and my pitch.

I watched, frozen, as she put the drying flowers over the cake and laughed. A jagged laugh. Not mine. ‘Happy belated birthday! It took you so long that the flowers have dried. See?’ It was not my voice anymore. It sounded hollow and strained and masculine in tenor.

To my horror she began to cut the flowers instead of the cake and the wax begin to crumble around the mound, looking like shavings of wood. A slow number had begun to play from somewhere. A guitar. Emanating a jaunty pain. There were many people standing around me now, watching me and gesticulating in my direction, telling some secrets to each other in whispers.

‘I have to go. Listen, I am going.’ I said to her. This time the words came from my lips. She was not there.

I dreamed of another memorial service. This time for a powerful, wealthy woman who I did not know. Her name was Marlan and there was a lot of food involved. Now I'm wondering if she was Marlin, like a fish, which we all know is Jesus for the secret handshake. Right?

dreamed a lecture about de la soul, without any real perspective on where or who I was in relation to this. I understand only that a professor (who I wasn't) was speaking on a kind of fifties-future (world's fair style) island podium. music by de la soul that I had never heard before. he described their newest record as the greatest work of art of all time. all their record covers were iterations of what is actually the cover of the recent eponymous record by the band The Adventure, in different pairs of colors. woke up & the music was gone. took a few minutes to remember different music.

Last night there was some dream involving fashion models I believe.

I was in another house. A large house. With lots of rooms and a huge compound. There was a big hole in the ground near the entrance and a big heap of mud was surrounding that hole. The mound of damp mud looked too heavy to be moved with the small shovel and I was wondering how to get that large hole filled. Next to the mound there was another patch of ground, which was green. Lush green, surrounded with lovely fresh flowers. I was pestering my mother to go back to our old house. The house, which had an arid patch of land around it and was filled with a vast nothingness .She ignores my plea and walks to the kitchen waving a ladle in the air, saying it was getting late to cook dinner. Maybe I can help her. The kitchen was submerged in water. There was water everywhere. Even the utensils were floating in that flood. I am flailing my hands and feet, only to be sucked in deeper by the unrelenting currents that have appeared in the water lodged kitchen. I see a fading image somewhere away from the watery haze before my eyes, but am not able to scream. My breath is growing fainter, re-surfacing in unfamiliar half tones, and I keep thrashing my arms around, to reach the surface. Suddenly, the mounting storm engulfs me, and I fall on the rising surfs, sinking deep inside, but could not find my voice to call out for help. I see that a starless darkness is howling beyond the white crest of the waves, “Wait…!” I call after my mother, but I am caught by the vortex of the whirlwind. The crazy waves crash upon me, ready to break me into pieces. I am gasping for breath as I look across the shores, writhing in my helplessness. I do not see my mother anywhere. Only the tall and undulating shadows of dark waters, looming across the kitchen walls.

I wake up breathing hard, with my head on my numbed arm. My arm feels as heavy as stone, with no sensation, and no life. I let it remain, like a log beside me, waiting for it to come back to life.

I am trying to make a u-turn in my car into oncoming traffic when I notice a group of people marching in parade. Somehow I mange to complete my u-turn behind these people; less a parade I see now, and more like a funeral procession.

I am on foot. I walk behind the slow moving procession. Someone holds a banner aloft to commemorate the priest who has died. The banner holds the photograph of this priest in all his finery, his image akin to those I have seen in a sepulchre atop one of the Eugenien hills in Italy. The photo of the priest presumably was taken while he was alive but in it he looks already dead.

The slow moving people in the procession have left an empty lane to one side through which those not part of the parade can pass at a normal pace. I walk with a group of strangers behind the procession. My unknown to me companions are not involved with the funeral but they seem happy enough to dawdle along behind. I break off from them and take off down the empty space.

‘I’m in a hurry,’ I call back to my unknown companions.

Then I find I am with an old boyfriend. We kiss for a long time. In between kisses he notices that the lower half of my legs are covered in long black hairs, unevenly spaced along both legs. In some places small tufts sprout. Their roots seem half dislodged around a few reddened hair follicles that have become infected. I am ashamed at the sight of them. My boyfriend says nothing. He must leave me now to go off for his therapy session, but he tells me that he does not mind being late.

‘You must not be late,’ I say to him. I offer to drive him in my car. His therapy session begins at 9 am. Just as we are about to leave another friend arrives. Now my boyfriend is my husband. This other friend then tries to talk my husband out of going to his therapy.

The alarm sounds and I wake up.

I am in my mother’s kitchen, the kitchen from my childhood, which, in the manner of dreams, is both different from how it was, and irrevocably the kitchen I knew. Here is the island unit, here the big wooden table. Here’s the rubbish bin.

The bin is over-spilling: the rubbish bag needs changing, and it leaves me with this creeping greasy feeling.

It’s so incredibly noisy in here. My mother speaks but I can’t hear a word she’s saying: it’s as if she’s been muted. I think the radio must be turned to some ungodly volume, so I turn off the radio, but I still can’t still hear my mother. Then I realise it must be the TV making all the noise, so I turn the TV off. I’m angry at my mother for having so much noise in here and expecting me to hear her, or perhaps she’s angry at me for not understanding her.

Then I am in my living room, the living room of the flat in which I live right now, though the family kitchen is still somehow next door. My laptop screen is flashing messages, and some are from my boyfriend, and some are from an editor. And the editor is typing in caps and says ‘ADDRESS!!’ And I think well, okay, she needs it for sending me a copy of her publication, though I didn’t know this was going to be a print thing, but this is a bit rude and unprofessional, and just weird, and why is she messaging me on gchat? And she says ‘HON, ADDRESS!’ and she just keeps messaging, like she’s drunk or ADD. And I get confused between the messages from her and the ones from my boyfriend.

And the kitchen’s still so noisy, and my sister’s trying to tell me something, and I wake confused and irritated, but I know I must have managed to hear something my mother said because I'm left with this lingering memory of her voice.

My husband and I are working as border guards for people who try to enter via the coast at the topmost end of Australia. It’s hot and dry, yellow scrub everywhere, and in the middle of a dirt patch we stand at a flat table covered with documents.

In time my husband goes off to a different section and leaves me in charge overnight. He rings on the telephone at one point and asks me to arrange a sign that we can hang from a tree. The sign must read:

‘All visitors, please shake hands with the official party as you enter the coastline.

I see a family arrive at one stage. The woman/mother of the group holds back from crossing the border, a thin strip of land between the ocean and the shore. The others race ahead. They want to come here; she does not. They skip across easily while she is not looking and then once alone she has no choice but to follow.

My daughter helps me with the sign. She sticky tapes together two sheets of A4 and pins them to the tree.

When my husband finally returns in the morning he tells me he had trouble sleeping. It was so hot outside. But I, on the other hand, slept like a baby.

At the beginning of this dream I was getting food in a fast-food restaurant. It is unclear (and unimportant) which one. Its location is also unknown, but it must have been in my hometown because when I came out to my car I drove just a short distance before I arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house. My sister was with me as I pulled up to the front door and parked. The porch had markings on the concrete floor indicating a parking space for a bicycle. It also contained the universal symbol for handicapped persons. As my sister exited the car I handed her a long note that had been given to me by a young girl at the restaurant. She had handed it to me with the explanation that it was for my sister and had been written by her mother, who was seated at a nearby table. The woman had waved to me and I had said hello to her.

Next, the dream shifted locales abruptly. I was now at the showing of a movie with both my mother and my sister. The theater was an old car dealership building on the highway in the center of Highland, NY. The screen was small - not much larger than a large screen tv, and was in the front corner of the room we were in. Most of the wall of that room was the large plate glass window of the showroom. Approaching from the northeast was a storm. The wind and rain was intensifying by the minute, but in its wake the skies were clearing. During a lull in the action onscreen my sister asked me what time my appointment was. Apparently I had a meeting of some kind to attend. The storm grew more intense and the sky darkened considerably. The plate glass window began to crack and everyone in the audience moved to the rear of the room to avoid any flying glass should it shatter. Finally, the glass did break and someone shouted that a tornado was approaching. We could see it through the broken window. We heard the distinctive roar and panic set in. The cyclone was headed straight toward us. The audience scattered through two doors in the rear of the room and ran in all directions. I lost track of the whereabouts of my mother and sister as I headed north along the rear of the building. There were heavy curtains or drapes hanging all around me as I continued to make my way along the outside wall. I made my way past other buildings along the edge of a steep incline behind them. Every so often I would part the curtains to check on the status of the tornado. During one such look I watched a building shatter and be torn apart. I kept moving until the funnel cloud had passed and begun to dissipate. As I made my way back toward the road to see the devastation and begin my search for my mom and sister someone approached me and said that there was someone nearby from up near Kingston. He had earlier heard me exclaim that the storm seemed to be dissipating to the north where I was from. At this point I awoke and the dream was over. I never did find my missing sister or mother.

...three uncles dead in car-crash I'm in a warehouse & responsible for cutting up their bodies for burial....takes me an hour to cut one piece into tiny pieces, a rack of lamb like a hand....warehouse like something from a Mafia movie where drug deals go bad....

This is so slow, I'm inexperienced & crying now....must confess to the two undertakers, I -- I'm Donnie Brasco? -- can't ever get this done in time for the funerals. They'll do it, but how can I find the money, when I'm sure it will cost at least $5,000 for each body.

Walking in dreams I sometimes
looking over my shoulder shouting empathy
across the sea, the surf subtles sparsely
across suggestions of “Have I been here already?
Is that already happening?” before
awake alert I glance sidelong only to find her hanging along.

A wordless progression
of images and photographs


pick up a leaf
reveal a face
hidden beneath

see the sky
a stream

a fern
a cloud

reach inside

surprised
to find

my hand again

I had a weird dream that I met Sylvia Plath in some underground cave of water and she was showing me how to get to some land.

The Dream-weeping willows

The yellow car stopped at the entrance of my house and someone opened the passenger’s door without stepping out. I saw the glimpse of a brown hand, spotless edge of a white sleeve and gold cufflinks with insignia of dragons embossed on it. I waved a goodbye to them and with joyful strides set out towards the waiting car. My haversack felt empty as I laid it on the back seat. Hollowed and pulpy, as if I have dropped everything on the way. I pressed on the black leather in panic and heard a whoosh of air escaping from the half open zipper. He smiled at me and said nothing.

I looked back at them, for one last glimpse and final wave, but there was no house, no door. I saw a row of weeping willows, yellowing in the autumn sun. Beyond that was a mossy, black wall and they were sitting on it. Laughing, jeering faces. Their lips made a perfect ‘O’ and they waved their arms at me wildly, in unison. Go…just go!

The road ahead was wet and gray, undulating like a writhing, black snake. The walls at both side of the road was broken down and painted with a parched yellow color. Suddenly it rose, higher and higher as the car sped on the empty road.

‘Will we reach on time?’ I asked his rigid profile.

‘We will reach.’ His voice was ricocheting against the whirr of the engine. I tried to hold on to the edges of my seat but there was water everywhere. No safety belt, just water. Rippling, raging, rising waves and my hands just scoured at the angry bubbles without holding on to anything. The sharp and cold currents were gnawing at my fingers and I found my side of the car caving slowly into a sidewalk quagmire.

I looked at him and he was still looking ahead. Moving the steering wheel furiously, with one hand. ‘Stop.’ I said but I didn’t hear my voice. I said it again but the sound did not come out. My lips moved, gasping for air, like the mouth of a fish left out on the dry shingles. No sound came out still. I reached over to shake him, pull out the key from ignition, but he was not there. The seat was empty. The car had stopped and it was sinking into the squishy ground at my side. I opened the door of the car and swam through the yellow waters of a muddy river. The sun was beating down, scorching my skin, as I looked up at the dry vacant sky. The yellowing walls at the side of the road were turning into willows again, and I ran on the hot, dry tarmac. My feet were hurting as it hit the concrete surface. He was chasing me now. His gold cufflinks glinting in the sharp sunrays as he waved at me to stop.

I ran and ran and getting inside a bathroom locked myself in. the bathroom was freshly painted in bright pink color and a white plastic bucket was put upside down on the floor. He was sitting on the bucket removing his cuff links.

‘I can’t seem to get rid of these.’ He spoke to me and I nodded.

In the corner of a yard I didn’t recognize, my father was raking leaves by a wooden fence. The leaves were old and rotten and piled deep. There was a small tree trunk nearby that I thought should be removed. I told my son it would be easy to dig out. But when we walked around it, the other side was massive. I said, “What happened? This tree looks like it’s 300 years old.” Two words, then, died on my lips: “petrified” and “sycamore.” My father, meanwhile, had found another area under some bushes that needed raking. I could tell by his movements that he was angry about something. He quickly finished the area and went to the front yard. We followed him. The sun was up in the backyard, but in the front it was still mostly dark. My father disappeared behind some bushes near the foundation. Again, he started raking. A neat row of leaves appeared on the lawn. Then, silence. My father was gone.

I dreamed I had traveled overseas for the next International Autobiographical and Biographical Association conference (IABA). I was on a bus traveling to my hotel in Morocco, where the conference was to be held. I travelled with my friend, Christina. When the conductor came to us I had no money for my ticket and needed to borrow a pound from her. Christina was gracious in lending her money but I felt dreadful (she could ill afford it) and I determined that I should not forget to repay her.

Next I am in a queue of people led by the conference organiser, Margaretta Jolly. She has a clipboard under her arm and seems officious as we weave our way through long corridors in the Moroccan university (which looks for all the world like any university I have even been inside in Australia – the same dull grey office chairs and desks) en route to the conference room. So far I do not recognise a soul and I feel sadly out of place.

We reach a sort of dead end in the form of a large room with windows. The only way out beyond the door through which we came is through the windows. Margaretta makes her way through one of them with a couple of others but a university caretaker stops the rest of us. We must not travel through university windows this way, he says. In order to get to the conference room we must backtrack part way along from where we have come and then turn down another corridor.

Eventually we reach the room, three quarters full of people already. For a while I sit down with Millie M and her husband. I am surprised to see them here. This is an IABA conference, not a psychotherapy one. We chat. Millie is eating from a plate piled high with what I imagine to be Moroccan food, couscous, and some sort of exotic dips, fruits and nuts. She is friendly but I sense an awkwardness, whether in her or me, and I am glad to get away.

I sit beside a woman whom I have never seen before. She does not wear a nametag. Nor do I, I realise, and wonder whether it would not in fact be helpful for all of us to wear such tags. The woman introduces herself. She spells out her name, which she says so quickly that I cannot catch on to the letters: L.E.U… or some such thing.

‘I am a professional atheist,’ the woman says. She has a look on her face as if she expects me to be impressed by these words, whether positively or negatively. She has said this to people before and clearly gets a reaction every time.

I am impressed, but before I can say more the conference begins. Margaretta starts off a discussion about autobiography and various people speak. When it comes to my turn I respond to the story of the woman who spoke before me. She had been telling the audience about how she had spent her last two years of school in a Catholic convent as a boarder. She had won a scholarship. Somehow her story seemed to be packed into a box of Vita Brits. I could see the half packed box on the stage in front of me. I started to speak about my own reservations about priests.

‘I do not like priests, ‘I said, no longer confident. I realised as soon as I had said this that my audience disapproved – furrowed brows, cross faces. There were priests in the audience perhaps. I had spoken out of turn. I tried as hard as I could to backtrack.

‘It’s not the people I dislike,’ I said. ‘It’s the position.’

But it was too late. I rattled on then about something to do with my own childhood when someone sitting nearby called out to me,

‘What’s your point?’ I tried desperately to find one, to bring my comment back to the story of the previous speaker, and to wind up my words. The conversation went on then with other people taking their turns to speak. I looked around the room indignant. I wanted to go home, to leave this large group. I felt such a failure. This is an IABA conference but none of these people are autobiographers. They are historians and people from memory studies, literary critics and the like. I am an autobiographer and they hate me for it.

The telephone rang and I woke up.

A snippet of a dream. I went to a supermarket, one of those small IGA types where the corridors are narrow and dark and some of the things high up on the shelves look as though they have been there for a long time, well past their used-by dates.

I was looking in the toothpaste section for a substance I could use on my gums. My fifteen-year-old daughter who wears braces on her teeth uses something like this whenever her braces are adjusted to stop the freshly realigned wires from digging into the sides of her cheeks. I was delighted when I found the stuff in a form I had not seen before –cylindrical sticks of what appeared to be a clear resin like substance. They reminded me of the glue sticks my children use in their glue guns.

I selected the largest pack, which contained about eight sticks and made my way to the register. There were already two women there, one of whom kept leaving her place at the counter and rushing back into the corridors in search of more groceries. The cashier had decided to serve her first, which seemed unfair to me because I sensed the other woman had been there longer and besides the first woman was holding everything up.

The second woman, waiting her turn, exuded that anxiety I often feel when I rush through the shopping. She said nothing but I could feel it in her body language. She was in a hurry. Impatience poured from her pores but if the cashier registered this she did nothing about it. I felt relieved that for once I was not in a hurry.

My memory of the dream peters out here and I am left with a vague sense that it took forever for the two women to be served. I had entered the supermarket in daylight, by the time I walked out night had descended.

Last night I dreamed:

There's a devil statue in my attic. A man approached me and offered his help to get rid of it, but I had to be careful because the devil statue could hear everything I said. Then I became suspicious that maybe the man was trying to trick me to get close to the statue. 3 people I know (1 poet/writer, a past co-worker of mine and one of Chris') were trying to build a machine to wake up the devil statue. I tried to stop them. I tried to hide parts they were using to build the machine. But it was no use. They were gonna wake up the devil.

I dreamt I was defending The Kindly Ones to three people who didn’t understand it. I gave a long, eloquently worded exposition of the book, putting particular stress on the chapter called “Air” – I woke up as I was in mid-sentence, discussing Genet and Bataille. As I woke up I thought to myself, Good grief, I have to defend it in my dreams even…

The night before I finished translating a 500-page sentence I dreamt I saw the last page and was devastated to see that the sentence came to an end three paragraphs before the actual end of the book. All that effort wasted, I thought. I saw the page very clearly in the dream: the long sentence coming to an abrupt end, and then three paragraphs full of short sentences after it. I woke up with a feeling of dread, which was eased when I saw that that was not actually the case: the sentence continued its sustained breathlessness to the very end of the book.

I had a dream that I was in Paris and carrying the book around. I went into J Crew (yes, in Paris) and gave them my credit card - I think you had to get a credit card to get in there. My card was bad, so they said, 'we'll have to take your book away.' I FREAKED out and ran out of the store. It was raining and my book got wet. This is the third dream 'in which I was a poet' in two weeks. I also dreamt that Eileen Myles was my boss at the Department of Education and that I was trying to write a poem like Mei Mei Berssenbrugge writes a poem - with collage pieces all over the table.

I don’t know why, but every few weeks or months, I dream that I’ve either forgotten to prune the vines and trees on our old family farm, or that it’s late in the season and I’ve fallen far behind. It happened again last night. First I thought I’d better prune the vines by the road so the place wouldn’t look like it had been abandoned. Then I remembered the apricots, and the next thing I knew, I was near the top of a ladder putting the finishing touches on a tree with a pair of long-handled shears. When I climbed back down, it was summer and I was in a park, trying to figure out how to prune the various trees and shrubs growing alongside a quiet residential street. Someone I couldn’t see said, “Maybe you should ask the doctor.” And I said, “What would the doctor know about pruning shrubs?” Then there arose the scent of dampness and mold, and I said, “Soon I will find the graves.”

I woke from this dream in the middle of the night and I thought I must write it down now, but I could not bear to revive the dream through the writing. I wanted to get back to sleep and escape the images that would not leave my mind.

We were in a room, a group of us. I was there with my daughters. We had been kidnapped at knifepoint. One had been taken aside. Our captors had chopped off her hands and feet and trussed her into a white shroud. She lay there like an amputated mummy, alive still, but silent. In the dream I noticed that there was no blood seeping from her open wounds and I wondered about her pain.

Two of our captors, the leaders, decided to leave us in the care of the others. They went off in search of food and slammed the door behind them. They had been careless. They left a rifle stretched out along a table. It reminded me of all the rifles I have seen in television movies since I was a child.

I knew what to do. Grab the rifle and point it outwards. Pull the trigger.

By the time I had it in my hands and had shoved it in the direction of one of my captors the trigger had gone off. The one in my sights did a sort of jog before landing on her feet. Somehow I had missed.

In a split second I had them all there at my attention. My captors were now my prisoners but in that same split second I realised there were no more bullets left in my rifle.

Did they know this? They seemed uncertain. They hesitated. They slunk back into their chairs.

I called to my off-sider, my daughter, to get hold of their guns. My off-sider, my baby daughter gathered them as I stood, my heart racing, and wondered when and if I would be yet again put to the test.

If I fired a shot would they see that I had no bullets left in my rifle, or was I mistaken? There were bullets: One tug on the trigger, followed by a loud blast, blood all over the walls and murder on my hands.

I am in a brightly lit white room with a few other people. One of them is a Gypsy man, maybe in his early 40s, who looks and feels very familiar to me - where do I know him from? First I'm speaking with someone else, but aware of his presence because he seems to be watching me. Them I'm suddenly speaking with him - how did that happen? I tell him that I, too, have Romani ancestry, through my birth father's lineage. Upon telling him this, it dawns on me that he IS one of my ancestors. A sudden glint in his eye tells me that he's aware of my recognition of who he is (as if he's been waiting for me to catch on). Now I'm aware that I'm dreaming. He holds up his right hand to give me a high five. As soon as our palms touch, he clasps my hand firmly in his, and I jolt awake.

Chris' 'healing hands' are successfully realigning people's backs. He realigns poets' backs, poets who I believe have lost their way, poets who I feel have hurt me. They all suffered serious back pain, but with a few deft adjustments, Chris fixes that. I make a joke that these poets should pay him homage--that Poet 1 should draw him as a statue with a very large penis and Poet 2 should give him a golden cow. Chris tells me he's a little tired. In addition to the poets, he also realigned 15 other people's backs during his walk on the beach this morning.

I’m expected to announce the winners of the class election and post it on the blackboard. As I try to go over the names in my mind I know I won’t remember them, but I can’t take this seriously. I have an oversize cup of coffee that’s spilling and full of grounds. Some young kids show me the sink which is huge and cumbersome. When I turn around a fight has broken out between two boys, but then I realize it’s a play fight.

This is the best time of the day for writing and yet I feel I can’t use it. I fear I can’t use it because I have that empty disinterested feel that I sometimes get when everything that comes to mind seems trivial and scarcely worth writing about. This is the blank page syndrome. I suspect there are many who when confronted with the single page might wait and wait, might fiddle with words. This happened in my dream now as I come to think of it. I was at a meeting with university types, including Klaus N. Klaus was involved in talking about history and the past. At one stage I noticed a writing friend, working at her desk alone. On a sheet of paper I saw that she had written down seemingly random words. She then played with each word in turn, words like ‘loosely’. Something about the ‘oo’ letters led on to other words containing such letters.

I wish I could remember now the sense my friend made of her words because in the dream I knew she was working to create new ideas. I tried myself later in my dream to do something similar, but my ideas seemed prosaic. Somehow I was stuck at the surface of words, their sound, and their shape. I could not fathom deeper meanings no matter how hard I tried. The emotional tone in my dream was one of sadness; the left out experience that comes from not feeling as though you belong. Desperately I wanted to belong and to impress but it was not working and I sat at my desk trying to stretch meaning out of words that would not oblige me, while the other people, engaged in conversation, walked on by.

I had a bad dream. Very gory. Some kind of murder investigation. I was in a huge barn-like structure, dark wood, wide open rooms, barn-like floors. I was maybe four stories up. It was some kind of camp. There were cots lining the walls. And in the cots were the corpses of slain people, all young, in their early 20s, brutally murdered by being stabbed or cut. So many. Horribly sad. Then we found the person who had committed the murders: a young man, also in his early 20s. Before he could be arrested he threw a large black computer keypad into a swimming pool that was now somehow in the middle of the room. Then he jumped in. He electrocuted himself.

This morning I dreamt that I was waiting to be sworn in to my new job as a congressman and while trying to remember the oath, I was mildly embarrassed to realize that I wasn’t quite acquainted with a particular issue that I should have been speaking out on.

I dream endlessly of a man who lives alone and finds himself persecuted by the presence of uninvited people whom he know to be mirages – ghosts. He orders them out. He throws things at them, but still they arrive, men and women, all types, ordinary people as well, but they are not invited and he is slowly driven mad.

Then I am at the university. I want to make contact with Joan from my writing class. ‘Old Joan,’ I want to say, because Joan must now be nearly eighty. I wander around the University of Melbourne from my youth. There are pieces of plaster left sticking out from a position on the wall upstairs and I stand in front with another girl trying to prise them off. We watch them fall to the ground. I know that these traces of plaster are part of an experiment, a research project to establish the fate of this plaster – will it fall of its own accord, will students pick it off, or will it stay?

We prise it all off, large shards of concrete and watch it fall, worried that it might hit someone below. It does not. By the time we have scraped the wall clean and walk away, I hear one of the nuns, the reverend Mother say to her colleague,

‘We hope the students leave one wall intact’.

It is too late. We have peeled the concrete lumps off both walls.

This dream reminds me of Italy, the land of render. Two weeks ago as my husband and I walked through the town of Teolo we watched workmen repair walls. They mixed a red brown paste pitted with bits of broken tile to fill the holes they had unearthed behind a layer of render, presumably peeled back because of rising damp. Then they rendered over the lot in white plaster.

To me, this could be a metaphor on life.

Dear Tig:

I had a dream about you last night. Peter and I came out to visit you in Arizona, and the land was covered in wildflowers. We hopped in the back of an old pickup truck and drove around looking at all the colors. Then we spent a lot of time collecting flowers and stripping the petals off to make heaps of petals on a white enamel counter. Oh, and I did your dishes.

Of late musicians and artists appear in my dreams.

I sat in the humble mountain home of cool and kind Carlos Santana, listening to him play and tell of the heirlooms about him. Notably a silver flute. Not tarnished, but old. Creamy soft. His grand or even great-grandfather's flute.

The flute was wrapped in a heavy alpaca knit sweater, and in the body of the flute were markings. Secret markings. Triangles. Numbers. 19.18.17.11, scribed in triangles on the plate near the thumb rest. The numbers woven into the warp and weft of the sweater now used to protect the flute. Magically, the plate opened to reveal the markings more clearly.

I was told by Carlos that it represented a Mexican tradition (which he named and I thought I recognized the word from life, but could not repeat it now, if my life depended on it). The tradition I was told was that his grandmother, or great grandmother, as the case may be, had knit the sweater as a gift to accompany the grandson, providing comfort for the departing man as he headed off to live in the world. A gift of appreciation for the comfort and protection she had received from the grandson.

Yes we talked of guitars, but memories were blown in the flute's happy breath. Oosh 'bgoosh.

I needed only to tie a ribbon around a nice flat box from a department store, but the lid came off, the box fell from the table, and the contents shattered on the floor. In that brief moment, the table turned into one of the old wooden trailers my father and I used in the vineyard on our farm many years ago. The trailer was covered with things that have been in our family for ages. Some were broken, others were oddly distorted. There was one wrinkled envelope on which my mother had written, as a reminder to herself, that my father had died. I started putting the bits and pieces into a brown paper grocery bag.

Last night’s dream parade included: Renny Pritikin, a suggestion from me that we didn’t need the big room we had built for video editing because the software made all the decks redundant, photographing buildings on fire at night, traveling from Sweden to Finland, a zombie dream so frightening that I woke from it and refused to go back to sleep except that it part of another dream, some fight with people during an urban breakdown like a riot, David Deitcher, helping him locate a display case for an exhibition he was the curator of, becoming interested in working with etching plates, attempting a few monoprints regretting that I hadn’t looked through all the books I saw for sale next door because of the ideas they would have given me for drawings, trying to get my burning building pictures into the Chronicle, because its offices were nearby.

Dreamed that a friend of mine bought a house where the Obamas were temporarily living with their three children (they had a new baby boy). The house was painted a kind of oxidized copper color, and was near an ocean. The house was designed to have a partly open space inside like a kind of dock beneath which water from the ocean was flowing. The water was full of life: a strange creature I was calling a “skate” although it wasn’t a skate, but some kind of camouflage-y, leaf-resembling fish that stayed upright on the water like a little sail (it “skated”), and any number of jellyfish, octopi, and other creatures that looked like microscopic organisms blown up very large… and all of these were biolumimnescent. Trippy! I remember some of the details of the house’s interior: a kind of patchwork of linoleum and hexagonal bathroom-style tiles on the kitchen/ entranceway floor, a little corner shelf made of decorative Italian tiles, but very old, everything old, unmatched, in yellowed tones. Old hardware on the kitchen cabinets, lucite with little flowers, I think, and circular, like those I saw recently in a neighbor’s house, apparently the same ones Louis Armstrong had in his house in Queens Anyway I kept going back in the dream to look at the water space and all of the life forms that moved around in it.

#1

I was tied naked to a stake
in a gawd-for-saken land
way out "there"
the sun was blazing hot

and circling me a- hooten and a-hoolerin'
was a band of (also) naked Indian women-girls


#2

I am falling head first down down down a tube..
I can see a light wayyyyyy down there...
then suddenly POW!
I egress from the dark-dank tube

into the light and just drift endlessly away

I'm at a cocktail reception (dinner to follow) in a gathering place with a big floor-to-ceiling front window. The Jackson family is there, milling around, and I'm talking to Janet. Despite their world-wide notoriety they seem very friendly and down-to-earth, though a bit distracted. When it's time for dinner I end up sitting next to Michael, but the name on his seating card is "Brian Jeffrey" (or "Jeffries"). He's very charming, but shy and uncomfortable. After dinner he disappears and everyone is worried, looking for him. I lose interest in their search and drift off. A few days later my sister Toni shows me two telephone messages she wrote down for me while I was out: one is from someone who's supposed to be my dead boyfriend Arnie (or maybe Woody Allen -- ??) and the other is from "Brian"/Michael. These notes were written on the back of a small piece of paper torn from a tiny notebook -- I almost missed them. Brian's note is a message about a big party he's inviting me to, but it's not until "12/14" (at first I think it's "1/14"). Toni's note says " . . . he said there'll be poets and musicians there, and he thinks you'll really like it." He's left a number, but I won't call him — calling will make it seem like I like him or something — I'll just show up.

Dream in 3 Successive Parts:

I was eating a bowl of small pink peony petals (conceptually peony, but blown rosebud looking), slightly browning at the edges so they HAD to be eaten. Like cereal. Out of my green/blue handmade bowl. I wondered why it wasn't a more popular breakfast food.

Then a cavernous cement-floored shop with a Grand National body up on jackstands waiting to restored.

Then my father asked me the rules to a game I never heard of. "Can't you explain it to an old man like me?" But I didn't know what he was talking about. Felt very sad.

Dream I go into a room where there are maybe five guys who look like figures from Aztec cartoon drawings. Some of them are maybe animals. Each one is bodypainted a different kind of metal: oxidize d copper, bronze, etc. Each one has some kind of magic jewelry that, when they put it on, acts as a torture device. Two of them argue about whether they have any volition or not about whether the jewelry will torture them. One says, I’ve been painting? eating? it all my life.

This morning I dreamed I was getting ready for work. I was applying
lipstick, Cherry Cola, an actual lipstick I had when I was a girl, and
matching eye shadow, and my lipstick wasn't exactly right so I put
another color on top and all the while I was humming Mozart's horn
concerto K.412. Then I got dressed in a red skirt and black stockings,
and a red blouse and red shoes, and a short red wool coat and a red
beret still humming the horn concerto, and I was happy in this ritual
but I was late I was late for my bus, I knew I was going to be late for
work. I picked up a pile of books and held them close to my chest and
ran outside, and I was in New Orleans or Paris because the street was
full of open outdoor markets except for an unusual handrail all the way
down the street which was polished wood with knobs-the kind of knobs
you'd hang a short red coat on, and I was running and humming the horn
concerto and it started to snow, and my feet were slipping in the snow
(my shoes were small red flats), and I realized I was going the wrong
direction away from my bus instead of toward it, so I turned and ran
back down the street, snow coming down even harder, humming Mozart the
whole time happy to be inside of Mozart inside of my dream, and thinking
how fine the red wool coat was, and tasting the Cherry Cola lipstick,
but a little anxious to be late for work.

Just dreamed that the New York Times this morning, instead of having "New York Times" at the top of the front page, had "THROWS WHITE SPACE AWAY"

broadway junction


i had this dream last night

broadway junction

she spoke to me

her language

was these strange

whirs and whines

she asked me

if we would burn her down

she wanted to be ashes

i told her

yes

i told her

i'm sorry honey

i asked her

if

when she's all ashes

if we could retrieve

her stained glass

pieces

and wear them

as our halos

she said

sure

as i got off the train

she said

one more thing

kendra,

tell eric

i always loved

him

I imagine that I am still living in NYC but have no place to stay, so I will sleep in hotel rooms as long as I can afford it. I know of a hotel in Queens that's relatively cheap, but my intention to head in that direction is deflected by someone (a total stranger?) who tells me that as long as I'm getting involved with hotels there's one in Midtown Manhattan I simply must visit. This person tells me that there are events that occur on the first floor or the basement levels that are very dramatic and are of astonishing phsyical beauty. However, if I walk into the hotel, it is better that I not seek to view the events directly; rather I should enter one of the rooms on the floors above--each room has a shaft with an open top attached to one of its walls, rising only to the height of an average human, and you can peer down the shaft to the hotel's bottom, though obviously you could also throw down small objects.

I manage to sneak into the hotel and enter an un-occupied room. Despite the fact that the hotel is so expensive for those who actually pay, the room looks comfortable but not particularly fancy. When I enter it is evening, and I want to take a nap; somehow the matter of seeing the once-in-a-lifetime spectacles below is not on my mind at this time, nor at any later time in the dream. I do nap for a short time, and then observe my suitcase on a table, with some of the clothes that were within it removed and placed neatly beside it. However, I do not remember opening the suitcase and taking out any of the clothes.

I discover that I am still tired, and decide to take another little nap. When I wake up it morning. I am quite panicked, because somehow I assume that with the sun up it will be harder to walk out of the hotel with no questions asked than it would have been in the middle of the night. I gaze wistfully out of the window of my fourth or fifth story room, pondering the possiblity that when I take the elevator down to the ground level I could bypass the front desk and find a back door that I could walk through inconspiciously. I gaze into a round mirror that stands upon another table in the room, and everything about my face is unsurprising except that what heretofore had been the whites of my eyes were now shiny silver.

Last night I dreamed that I was in a large lecture hall. A snooty, old-school, literary expert took the podium. He was somehow connected to Richard Howard. The literary expert looked around the room and decided it was too crowded so he read a list of names of poets and magazines who had to leave. They were all from smaller, less prestigious magazines.

After those poets left disappointed, a late-to-arrive poet tried to enter the lecture hall. The booted poets were gathered around the door, hoping to overhear the lecture. They told her she couldn't come in. The tardy poet interrupted the literary expert and asked for an exception.

I was furious. I stood up and said that there were plenty of chairs, everyone should be allowed to come back. Other poets in the room agreed with me.

The literary expert asked who I was -- I said I was the Paris Review.

On the second day I stayed home because it was the same speaker and I had quite enough. Gideon came home early with a note from school saying that they wanted him to be evaluated for 5 days because they believed there was something emotionally wrong with him. He flipped out at the 2nd lecture and attacked his classmates. I asked him if he did this and he admitted it. The note instructed me to call the counselor, "Zachariah," for the evaluation.

I was concerned. I understood his rage at the literary expert, I felt it too, but I didn't understand why he attacked his peers. His anger was misdirected. He should have bum rushed the podium.

christopher rizzo's name was gary fox, and he was wearing a suit where we wondered off to talk in his car then returned. later at a cafe' in kingston ny. i looked through beads on a table. lee ann brown was on the phone in the chair next to me, planning a boat trip with ( i realized) anne gorrick. lee ann didn't know who i was. she laughed about the fact that they were going to do a gas called B___ene (Benedrene?) on the boat. lee ann left after hanging up. k came back in, and we laughed about it. on the way out, i pocketed a bead.

We were in a grassy area next to a stream. The grass was so vibrant green it had a blue aura, how I imagine Tennessee to be. We were shy with each other at first. You barely looked at me but when you did it was with the same telling eyes as always. I could tell what you wanted to know and it didn't take me long to spill it. "You know I'm in love with you, right?" You melted a little at this. You were happy to hear that it's real. I was happy to see you standing your ground, not running away like I always imagined you would do. "I want to get to know you better," I followed. Ease. We can be friends.

At a dangerous turn in the river, a raft loaded with farm animals hits a snag. Several fall off — sheep, pigs, goats, cows — and are swept into the current. The air is filled with heartrending cries. Those still on board jump in the water after them. One, however, a large tan-colored pig with black spots, calmly climbs ashore and starts foraging in someone’s brightly colored vegetable garden. The pig doesn’t notice when the others slip beneath the surface.

1. It takes the form of a documentary. Recently, lots of people having been getting red lights shone in their faces. Just going about their normal business, then their face is illuminated a bright red. Investigators have tried to find the source of the light, but to no avail. It happens indoors and outdoors. There have been sightings of a large, red light source in the clouds.
   
   
2. I am in a comfortable beige study. Leather, sepia, oak. I am sitting on a comfortable chair and am petting a young polar bear. It is biting and scratching me (painfully). As I play with its white fur I notice the skin underneath is completely black.
   
   
3. I am trekking in the Himalayas. It feels like Tibet. There is a large group of us and we walk single file on the suggested path of rocks. It is very sunny. Our guide tells us that we are to climb a natural stairway - "Only 20 meters!" We climb and I am third up. There is a building and a stone doorway with a tiny hole at the base - the first two have gone through the hole. I know I cannot go through the hole, so I step around the doorway. It was free-standing anyway. The residents of the building welcome us. The others hand over a stone as a gift. I hand them a terracotta pot / waterbowl that I had picked up ealier and carried with me. I have put a stone in it as well.

1 .....something had been going on -- saw the shadow of a creature on the ceiling of small white room, no windows, descending -- not scary -- a parrot. I looked for biscuits in a cupboard and a white bowl for some water, because I knew the parrot had come to help us. The only biscuits I could find had jam in the middle & I knew that would not suit a parrot too well, but they were all I had. The only bowl I could find was wide and rather shallow, but never mind. I asked the parrot if it would like the biscuits and water and it said it would. "I'm glad you speak English," I said, knowing now for certain that it was a helpful person changed into a parrot....

&2 I was driving my car up a hill, round a bend, very badly, drifting way out to the right, dangerously, but it wasn't a car, it was a bicycle....Stefan was riding the bicycle and I saw him take off some thirty feet above the houses at the side of the hill, and disappear behind them. I heard him yell, in the distance, "Dad!". He was bloody, but no bones broken, walking towards me. But why had he been wearing his new green trousers when riding the dirty old bicycle?

This weekend I dreamed of an archeological dig (and deciding to homeschool Gideon so I could bring him along), speaking on who gets away with making butt thumbing threats, having to answer questions on religion when buying plane tickets, not being able to speak because my mouth is full of hard & sticky gum, separate tables, a Turkish beach vacation, pictures in my bikini from that vacation being posted on the Harriet blog, a man's sex reassignment surgery, knitting and iguanas.

For the first time in my dreaming half century underworld
there it was
a Monarch Butterfly.
yes ever flapping this first butterfly
a sight bringing me toward the surface
still i remained smiling asleep

I’m in a strange house with strange rooms oddly juxtaposed.
Doors are where they shouldn’t be; some open onto walls.
I ask the carpenter why this is so.
Muscular and old, he answers with a smile.

Now we’re outside, walking through an old industrial area.
I see trucks; workmen; the smudged rear windows of warehouses.

The carpenter is no longer a carpenter.
His work apron is gone.
Now he’s a madman with twinkling eyes.

Who knows what he knows.

My grandmother’s uncle was upset that no one recognized him. I touched him gently, affectionately, on the side of his face. His angry expression melted away. He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was still very old, but he was himself again.

I dreamed that some woman was combing my hair, digging the comb into my scalp. It hurt, and hair was being yanked out in huge clumps.

Running down a gentle slope scattered with old dry oaks, dodging circular bolts of lighting thrown by someone whose smile tells me he’s just having fun. The one aimed at my head wakes me up.

Last night I dreamed I was in Italy sitting around a table with a group of Australian friends, all of whom we had met by chance in the streets of Italy or at the beach.
‘You can almost guarantee running into someone you know,’ I heard one woman say to her companion.
‘It’s ridiculous to travel so far away and there they are, all your friends. May as well not leave home at all.’

I sat opposite old friends, Dianna and Roger. I had not seen them for years. In the dream they appeared just as they were when I knew them best over twenty years ago. Roger was still darkhaired and sprightly, Dianna, a couple of years older, still trim and fit. Dianna was nursing their daughter, who is now in her mid twenties, but in my dream Ingrid was still a small child of less than two. Dianna was stroking her cheek. There were other old friends and acquaintances, mostly those we had met through our years of contact with Chris and Suzie.

Earlier at another dinner in my dream Chris and Suzie and their two children were sitting at a table with Suzy’s elderly father. I knew that Suzie needed to help her father regularly to the toilet.

I was not happy to be there. They seemed such a wowserish family. Here we were in Italy and they were not even drinking wine with their meal. They were all on water, which is uncharacteristic of Chris.

Their daughter poured Bill and I a glass of wine from a Chianti bottle. Even though I was grateful for the wine I was annoyed that she had not at least asked whether we preferred wine or water. I did not like her making the choice for me.

I had with me a gold embossed Easter egg that opened up into some sort of container. In it I had stored my partial denture and some play dough from among Leo’s toys. Suzie took it from me curious about the shape of the egg. Her father then took it from her and before I knew it he had opened the egg and its contents went missing. I was furious. How could I sit at this table a front tooth missing and still have conversation? I wanted to leave.

We queued up for food at a huge bain-marie and again Chris and Suzie’s daughter poured Bill and I another glass of wine, while the others stayed on the water. Then Bill and I were roaming through the streets of Italy. Somehow Bill had managed to take his leave, even before the main course had been served and although I was glad to be away from them, I felt guilty to have not stayed at least till the end of the meal.

dream about tornadoes (recurrent) again last night.

The Mountain Lake

My dream begins with a short afternoon hike in the Catskill Mountains - a walk, really, since I am on a wide road like path with a moderate incline. I am accompanied by a young black male who seems to be a friend, though I don’t really know who he is. As we walk we share conversation and a joint of good marijuana, becoming quite high and happy. Eventually we reach a lookout point that provides a nice view of the surrounding mountains. At this point my friend seems to vanish and is replaced by several other people who I apparently know. I tell them about the rest of the trail to the top of the mountain we’re on and we agree to return the following day for the complete hike, arranging for an early start. Another short walk brings us to a small mountain lake surrounded by grassy lawns and picnic tables. I remark to the people I’m with that the water is quite cold and deep. As I walk along the shoreline I stumble and fall into the lake and begin to sink rapidly toward the bottom. I am suddenly aware that I have objects in both of my hands - a rock sculpture of some sort in one and my father’s old boy scout bugle in the other. I am reluctant to release the bugle, but realize that I must or I will drown. As soon as I resurface after releasing these objects I yell “Shit!” and start swimming toward shore, for I am suddenly in the middle of the lake. It is at this point that I realize that the people who are with me have changed. Gone are those who have accompanied me on my walk. They have been replaced by my cousin, his wife, and their teenaged son. All three have jumped into the lake to save me, but are now swimming along beside me. My cousin finds a shallow spot - a submerged rock shelf, and stands up as the rest of us continue to swim. I am not looking where I am going and bump into a young woman on an inflatable rubber raft. All around us are lily pads. The dream concludes as I approach the shore. A troop of girl scouts are having a picnic nearby and are unaware of what has been happening.

climb old concrete tower with a
railing across the top between ascent
& descent but there's no stairs for
descent -- vertigo

at my house one afternoon, W has
returned from a trip -- I ask his son
for news -- I'm playing a small digital
piano -- a small dog belonging to a visitor
snaps at me -- I put my forearm into
its mouth and it quietens down comes
& sits on the bar

looking out the window -- a big
black ape-like creature whose mouth
is a mushroom I am afraid of it &
hope it can't get in the house

in a bedroom a very young Jason
is sitting in a corner eating a sandwich
-- he throws up -- & then wants to go on eating his sandwich --
I try to persuade
him not to

My dreams last night came in snatches.

Ella, my daughter was a small child, not herself as I know her, but in the form of Benjamin from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a wizened up aged child. She lived in her room upstairs alone. I say she but she had an androgynous quality as if neither male nor female, neither old nor young, and she was lonely. I had managed to find her a puppy with whom she could play but for some reason this puppy did not stay and again my Benjamin Ella character was sad and lonely.

I was travelling in some foreign land with my husband and another of my daughters. My husband raced ahead as he often does and we were left to pull on our own resources without a map. We spent time in a large department store. I did not want to buy anything, only to look. Somehow the trip had gone wrong and I was bored. And worried about how we might spend the rest of our time.

My dreams merged here and I was back with Ella Benjamin. An old woman, proprietor of a large shopping centre, had said that Ella Benjamin could look after her puppy as she herself did not have time to manage it. Ella Benjamin was delighted.

One day later the woman came to visit. Ella Benjamin and the puppy were playing in the mad crazy manic way that puppies do, rolling and tumbling over one another. The puppy snapped at Ella Benjamin’s hands. The woman was horrified at the sight of this and slapped them both, forcing them apart.

‘He’s only a puppy,’ I said.

‘He needs discipline’, she said.

I woke up.

. . . dreamed that I called myself "Luke" after receiving a distress message from the princess on Obi Wan's TV. There was no time to waste. They were going to use the drug on her in the morning. Obi Wan agreed to help. First we stopped at a pharmacy to speak to a Hippowoman who knew of the place where the princess was being held. The Hippowoman delivered drugs to this zoo/military space facility. We had to be careful, her bosses were watching. Then Obi Wan and I spoke with the family of someone I went to high school with. I introduced myself as Luke but later in the conversation after they told me about the dead baby I admitted that I was known to them as Rebecca. But I didn't feel comfortable telling them about why I was now "Luke" or my mission. It seemed too weird to share, just like earlier in that dream when I crossed the street wearing a bikini and high boots. So goofy and exposed, no good explanation. I had trouble keeping it together after I learned of the baby. "They'll just have to try again" the mother said. It didn't seem that easy to me.

Two disjointed dream fragments:

1) A handsome woman with long black hair streaked with gray and tied back stands before a wash basin. She kneads a garment in the water, then gathers it up in her hands and holds it high above her head, wringing it out. The water cascades into the basin as she intones "ay de mi - los dolores son hechos de manchas..."

2) A woman is seated on a low, three-legged wooden stool, surrounded by 6 other women in an asymmetrical grouping, variously kneeling in front of and beside, and standing behind her. They are in a darkened room, and eerily illuminated from an unseen source. The scene looks theatrical, though it's not theater, and I'm simply witnessing rather than participating. The woman on the stool sings a lament, and the others join in the chorus. It is plaintive and beautiful. I don't remember the words - it might have been in another language.

Just a few nights ago, I had one of these reoccuring dreams where I’m chased by the authorities. What my alleged crime was, I have no idea. Late in the dream, I seek cover in a queen-sized bed that’s set right in the middle of the street. Actually, there’s two of us, but what happens between the sheets, let’s not go there. Anyway, the pressure becomes almost unbearable, until suddenly, I find the perfect escape. Call it poetic justice, or not, but I know I can get rid of my pursuers just like that–by waking up.

I had a dream that I had no ceiling. Above my bathroom there was nothing -- no plaster, no wood, no moulding, no tile. It was rotted. It was a black puddle above my shower. I was worried that other people would think it was gross.

I have a dream where I am with my family when suddenly, the ground begins to shake and rumble. We all start running. There is an alien invasion, and the aliens are these huge, metal spheres that roll over the Earth and destroy whatever is in their path. They don't exactly chase humans, but they do roll through more populated areas. My family runs and runs and runs. We head towards the coastal cliffs. We run through scaffolding of the side of the cliff, that presumably the aliens would not attack. We keep going, the thing rolls by and keeps rolling.

We meet up with some other people and go into this beautiful, coastal house with our community. Under the house, the group has built an extensive network of underground tunnels, with windows that open up in the cliff so that we can get light. You might not even know you're underground. We wait in the house until we hear that distant rumbling, and then run downstairs to the underground portion. The thing rolls over the house, destroying it, but we are all safe underground.

There is no way we can figure out to destroy the things yet, as they are extremely tough, metal spheres and we Earthlings don't know their weakness yet--but there is always a weakness.

We start hanging out in the beautiful underground house.

Last night I dreamt that it all made sense. Everything I did and said that night that I am now so ashamed of took on ordinary, understandable meanings. My words became innocent and well all laughed.

And then I came up with the idea for Fear Factor.

I dreamed I was on my way to school. Chris called to tell me that it was going to rain and I should change my pants. I told him to forget it, I was already late for school. I was late for homeroom, I considered going straight to my first period, but knew if I did that I'd be marked absent. On the stairs there were some handicapped students being helped up the stairs, they were moving slowly, so I went down the hall to take another set to my homeroom on the third floor. On the second floor I walked past an office. Inside was Joe Biden dressed as a judge.

The next dream was about Rebecca Loudon's 3 cats. A dominant male was beating on Paris the Genius cat. I told somebody to open the closet and make sure she wasn't trapped inside. It turns out, she had been.

I dream this some time ago. I dream that I have a bike, it's blue, it's a good quality bike, and it's too tall for me.

It's mine though. I ride it around campus. I'm free on my bike, and I'm empowered.

I lock the bike up--I attach it to one of the bike racks on one of the streets that border the quads.

I want to tell you that I've ridden my bike that's too big for me--that I ride it all the time--because I know you'd be proud of me that I've finally learned how to ride a bike. I'm proud of me.

But in the dream, as in life, we aren't talking.

I don't have the key to unlock the bike from the rack. And a part of it gets stolen.

I'm too small for the bike anyway.

I have moved into my new home in Ottawa. The house is huge, with interiors defined by flat, glaring white surfaces. Every room is tinged with a cold, clinical blue. The house exudes loneliness. I move through hallways and a bedroom and see two sets of sliding closets, unimaginatively placed parallel to each other.

I move to other parts of the house and see that it belongs to O's family; I’m their guest. The knowledge doesn’t lift my spirits—they’re not my favorite people. With the knowledge that this giant house is for a family of four, the spaces seem bigger than ever. I walk down a wide, white hallway to peer into O’s room. The king-sized bed is rumpled with toys and possessions tossed about. Objects—too much material wealth—litter the floor.

In another part of the house I see her younger brother. Small and nerdy, sporting oversized glasses with brightly colored rims—the trendy kind—he sits before a super-sized computer, eyes fixed on the screen. One hand deftly navigating the mouse, a vapid smile on his face, he is learning Chinese. As the words scroll by, he selects the characters he needs extra help with remembering, or that are otherwise important. The computer talks to him as he engages in this expedited process of learning. I see an unfair advantage at work.

I move to a workshop or display center, where Uncle L shows off the fancy centerpieces he has made. This is his hobby. Although he thinks of these items as high art, they actually look just like the expensive, pointless home décor sold in bourgeois chain stores such as Pottery Barn. As a form of appreciation for my looking at his art, he presents one of the centerpieces to me as a gift. It is one of the more boring-colored of the pieces. He could have at least given me a brightly-colored one.

Last night I dreamt that I was a virgin princess, and I was captured by three gods: the dragon, the dirt, and the dark. The dragon, the dirt, and the emptiness. The dragon, the emptiness and the grave. They were in competition with each other over me—it was a game for them, who could keep me, who could capture me from the one who had kept me. I flew on the back of the dragon, red scales and muscles flexing under me, until the emptiness pulled me away. The emptiness flaunted me until the dragon swooped in and took me back. Back and forth, back and forth, each taunting the other with his prize, just wanting the game to continue. And then we were in some building and I don’t remember who had me, but the dirt snuck in and the dirt grabbed me and pulled me along behind him down the stairwell, down and down and the dragon couldn’t follow and the emptiness was left behind, down and down until we were in a dirt basement, and I could not get back up and there was water running down the walls and there were rats and crawling things and the dirt did not even pay attention to me there, just tossed me to the floor and I cried and I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to get out. And somehow I managed to send a message to the dragon and the emptiness, to let them know where I was, so they could come and save me. And somehow I managed to get out and they took me again.

And I realized, I am in love with the emptiness and the dragon. I love their game. I love riding through the sky on the dragon’s back. I love the feeling of the emptiness enclosing me. I am in love with them. I do not want the dirt. I do not want the grave.

Except, later on the grave decides to woo me. He whispers look at this bed I have laid for you, and the other two will never notice and just come with me for a little while. And I am cautious; I don’t trust him, but I think that after just a little while, I will go back. And so I say yes. Take me away with you. Yes.

The dream I had last night must have been detailed, but I only remember one moment, and that’s the part right before I woke up. I don’t remember where I was, and I don’t remember if I was even myself, but whoever was conscious in the dream pointed out a very large, caterpillar-looking insect. It was about five inches long with furry spikes along its back, and I believe it was white. The last few moments of my dream involved this caterpillar finding another insect and killing it, taking it in its jaws and crushing it. A voice in my head said, “Why does he do that?”

There was a terrible apocalypse that made everyone's money sticky and no one could get their money out of the ATMs anymore. It had something to do with an anarchic, communal effort to pour maple syrup into the machines. Since apocalypses require one to make quick decisions, I had to make a split second choice about whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life indoors (in a building like the art deco American Airlines hangar at La Guardia Airport, the building with that beautiful font) or outdoors. I couldn't find Peter, so I had to make a choice that I thought he'd make so we could find each other. I choose the "indoor" option, and when I moved indoors, I could see his face pressed up against the other side of the glass. I made the wrong choice. So I begged and begged the "indoor" leaders to let Peter join us indoors, and they gave in to me. But when I ran up to meet him, I realized it wasn't Peter. It was someone impersonating my husband to get indoors and that again, I fucked up.

Last night I dreamed that I returned to high school after a mysterious absence. In the cafeteria a bully girl sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She wouldn't. So I picked her up and slammed her against another table. I held her down and dared her to free herself. She couldn't. She told me that I was "insanely strong" and I added that I was very angry too.

I dreamt that Ron Silliman had ended one of his blog posts with the words, "My weird."

My first night back home I dreamed the following things: funny-shaped pills, driving to many cities, a cheer/dance routine performed to a poem, a poet complaining about his sex life, a party, a mall, looking for a toilet in a salon and senseless murder.

I had a pleasant dream about Bill Luoma last night. Bill was going through my pile of books to get rid of, asking about the poems I planned to read last night. He had really good recall of poems of mine that were similar to but (in my mind) not as good as the poems I had intended to read. In my dream, I gave him the logic book that I have not yet given him in real life (Naive Causal Modeling, volume 1), and I talked to him about the advantages of backwards causation (part of the book argues the possibility of backwards causation, i.e. the idea that things I do today might have caused past events). I argued that backwards causation might enable Bill to change elements of his past life if he wanted to, by triggering backwards causation with his actions today, but Bill thought any past events he might be causing today had already happened and thus were unchangeable. But I said that meant that the effects would be determining the cause which is impossible. . .

In my dream Bill was using a baseball bat like a walking stick and spent a lot of time pausing to think. When he did speak I often felt surprised by what he said, and I had to think about how to respond to it. I guess this is my impression of Bill: soft-spoken, casual (not causal!) in affect, but deep, as if when you say something to Bill it takes a long time to float down through his attention, but when it's fully registered he comes back with an incisive but very light response. I'm always interested in conversation dreams which show me my internal models of other people, which are mostly about a mixture of gesture, timing, and tone. It's interesting to think of having these simple models of other people's way of presenting in one's own head--I wonder to what extent these models get triggered when doing, for example, email?