First Dream
My husband had come to help me carry loads of bulky items from a building to the car. The car was parked in a large lot with gravel on the ground. The gravel crunched as we walked over it. At one point I moved the car and had forgotten, so I walked too far and found myself at a bus stop.
       Then I got on a bus by mistake. I asked the driver to let me off when he stopped early to let a blond woman off who was riding on the outside of the bus. He wouldn’t open the door for me. I got very upset and told him how unfair he was.
       When we finally arrived at the first official stop, I got off. I sat on the bench with people waiting for the next bus and started calling my husband. At first I called the home phone number, but realized that I had to call his cell. The pad of my cell phone was very elaborate and I had a lot of trouble dialing. For instance, there were 2 ones and not both of them would register a one when I dialed. When I finally got through there was a lengthy message from my husband, not what I wanted to hear.


One Day

There was a big group of people who came to check why we hadn’t been receiving our deliveries. They handed us two magazines. There were two fish bowls on top of the counter, one holding a dead fish and one a living one. There was also a bowl of roses on the counter.
       We said that previously no one had come in and sat down and said here are your magazines. The leader of the group was disabled, sitting in a kind of wheel chair. There were two young women who approached him in the hallway. I asked one of them if I knew her. She said no.


The Next Day

Everyone was bringing things down from the room. For some reason Stephan was pushing our car by hand to turn it. We were yelling at him that he was pushing it into another car. All the buildings around were wooden. We were sure that the other car was a rental and that the damage was minimal. It was true. So they drove off after giving him not a card, but a newspaper.
       Then we got in our car which seemed to be red and started up a very steep hill. After we had driven only a block, I asked if anyone had checked our room. I said that I wanted to go back and check. So we turned around to do just that with Stephan commenting that it was fine because we had only gone a block.
       The feeling of the street was that it was very narrow with dark brown dry wooden buildings. The damaged part of the other car, the white car, was the back right hand tail light. The car we were driving was red.

Last night I dreamed I had been travelling through Europe with my husband.  When we returned home it was time for me to sit an examination, something to do with completing my PhD. 

I stood at one time in the Laurent café and overheard my current supervisor speaking to my previous supervisor , ‘Is she schooled deeply enough?’ he asked. 

I panicked then about the examination.  Maybe I did not know enough.  I scrounged around in the library for a book on the topic, a thin book, yellow covered, whose title, The Seven Principles of Autobiographical Theory, left me with the feint hope that if I could absorb enough of its details I would be okay. 

A man had written the book, this much I remember, but not his name, two single syllabled names, like Jay Hunt. 

I took the book with me to the railway station where I planned to take the train to the examination centre.  I stood on the platform of the station at the top of a ramp and noticed yet again that the flood waters had risen and were now enveloping the entire platform.  I watched the waters dip into my open toed shoes.  I wore lacy white stockings and worried that they might get stained from the muddied flood waters. 

I waited with a group of fellow postgraduates for the number 23 train, which pulled up eventually, an old ‘red rattler’ as these trains were once called, a sort of Harry Potter train, minus the steam.  I sat in a carriage with my young daughter and tried to read the basic principles of the book on autobiography.  I repeated the concepts over and over in my head. 

We reached our destination and in the flurry to get off the train I left the book behind.  As we filed out of the station, the ticket collector remonstrated with a number of passengers who did not have tickets.  I had lost my ticket too, but I was not too fussed.  Although he complained about the absence of tickets, the inspector let us through.

I was still worried about the examination and somehow as part of her efforts to help me, a woman, whom I can only recognise as an old friend of my mother from over thirty years ago, invited me to have sex with her.  The sex was most unsatisfactory and because we were both women we somehow connected through a hose that ran from one vagina to the other.  Someone walked in on us and we rushed to a stop, shame faced and hopeful they had not seen too much. 

Then I was driving this woman’s truck down Canterbury Road, weaving in and out of the traffic.  I was terrified of crashing the truck and felt very out of control.  I abandoned the truck for a bus trip back home to Wentworth Avenue.  When it came time to get off at my stop I dropped a pile of papers I had been carrying.  My long dead father, now alive and sober, offered to help me to pick them up. 

The dream, in my memory, came to an end here with the cry of the alarm.