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.