I am still having weird dreams. Last night I was helping an old man discover who had been trespassing on his yard by taking plaster molds of the shoe-prints left in the mud outside his front door. They were size six. A young teenager for sure.

Dream animals

Are all of creatures, or of creatures who turn into and out of people.

One night I opened closet after closet, all with cats inside, sleeping on the shelves. Almost identical, mostly black. The game was to indentify the real cat. When he looked at me, I always knew.

Near the end, a cat-furred goatlike creature, but lambsized. Creamy white, with a tannish head and pink stripes along his ears and a pink band around his belly. He made a sound I cannot transcribe.

Last night: bears. Or rather, one black bear.

At first a very fat robin (seen lots of these in waking days recently, orangey-red chests and very round) sat on a fence chirruping. A small bear, to robin-scale, popped in beside him dancing around. Then he got big and ate the bird. Then he stalked the yard and grabbed a man through a plate glass window. I had just said to the man, be careful he's behind you out the window.

I knew the man, but haven't spoken to him in years, since he was mostly a boy.

Luckily, a bear would not actually crash through a plate glass window to eat a man. Nor would he bother to eat a fat robin.

What a relief.

I was in college again and was at a reading. Unexpectantly, Bruce Andrews shows up and begins reading. Some people are annoyed because it was already the end of the reading and Bruce wasn't supposed to be one of the readers. But I'm in the front and in the middle of his reading Bruce demands cantalope. So I go into the kitchen area and find him cantalope and I'm about to bring him some of the melon, when Rosmarie Waldrop grabs it from me and tells me that she will bring it to him and tell him to end the reading. This happens. Many people leave, but I am still hanging out with Bruce because he thinks I'm going to let him crash at my house. We find a cassette tape that has recorded the poems people were making up in their head as Bruce was reading. I'm one of the people on the tape. I am very excited to hear my own thoughts recorded. Bruce misunderstands me and thinks I'm not interested and destroys my segment. I am very angry with him and leave. Then a player from the Polish Olympic handball team comes to us to show us his medal. Bruce and I watch several minutes of play on a video screen. I tell Bruce that I like games where the same formation is run over and over again until it works (soccer). He is not impressed with my assessment. I leave Bruce in a classroom filled with undergraduates hanging on to his every word. Also, during this entire dream, I am not wearing underwear and only a cloth to cover me. As all of the actions are occurring, I am worried that Bruce will notice I am not really dressed.

Dreamt I was reading at the Ear Inn and that the mic was broken, the lights turned off, the audience crowded around the bar, and only read for five minutes in panic. There is something about the premise of the east coast as an entity that freaks me out. Having not been in NY for 10+ years, I tend to feel like something about it is more intimidating than it probably is in reality. Though a particular form of agorophobia overcomes me there; being in streets surrounded by very tall buildings, I think triggers my vertigo in a strange way by making me feel as if I'm going to be flattened.

At the airport, desperate to find a rhinoceros. Did see/kept missing. In the meantime, I uncovered a covert Russian art deal going down in a garage offsite--in a desolate hangar. I distinctly remember opening the front of the hangar like a freight elevator. A mother called and said we were all out way past curfew. Japanese girls knelt at my feet telling me I had wrapped my leopard-scarved clogs incorrectly. The cell phone text kept reading "*SO".

Post-travel meltdown must account for the 13 hours of sleep I needed last night after a hellish week. Weird, odd dreams about traveling to Arizona, or was it Nevada, and accidently killing off semi-famous male poets. Also demonic possession, Oprah, and buying an umbrella.

Dream journey: Radioactive waste was coming out of a water fountain near the entrance of the park and I surrounded it with plastic chairs so that no one would touch it. Went home and Werner Herzog was on Hollywood Squares, bottom, right hand corner.

In February I visited my mother in a Catholic nursing home in northern Ontario. I dream of her almost every night. I just awoke from a dream in which we were flying on some fancy plane from one Pacific Isle to another. I got off the plane to deal with luggage. The airport was warm and sunny and the people beautiful. Unfortunately I woke up.