I dreamt I was standing by the windows in our living room in Brooklyn.  I glanced outside and it took a few seconds for it to dawn on me that it was nearly dark outside, in the middle of the day.  I had never seen it like that before, not even during the worst storms.  I went to the front door to look outside.  When I opened the door, it pushed me back, as if there were a powerful wind, though I don’t think there was.  A man was standing there, behind the locked iron grate.  I didn’t see him very well.  I didn’t want to see him.  With all my strength, I was able to push the door closed.  Upstairs, in a room more like the girls’ room at our house in the Hudson Valley, Charlotte was playing on the open futon with our visitors’ baby, a very blonde kid, with mentally defective eyes.  I asked to look at the baby, and accidentally almost let her head topple over.  Paul, a former close friend from Brooklyn, was in the room.  They must have been visiting us.  He came over to me.  I wanted to avoid Paul, but it was impossible.  He looked a little different, with darker hair, if that’s possible, and perhaps balding, or with a weird bald patch.  He asked if I had gone to my high-school reunion, saying, “You were born in the year so many kids were born, ’61, right?”  “In ’57, the year the most kids in American history were born,” I said.  He said he didn’t like high-school reunions.   By now, we were walking together outside, crossing a street to a park and playground.  I said, “It’s so tempting to focus on the people you don’t want to see, but if instead you focus on the people you want to see, you can have a great time.”  A midget or other small creature accompanied us in the park, smoking a half-cigarette.  I pulled out a pack of cigarettes.  The midget asked me for one, which annoyed me.  “They’re nearly a dollar apiece now,” I said or thought to myself.  Weirdly, the midget had shrunken to the size of an insect in the dirt by the sidewalk.  With a scissor mouth, it cut the cigarette into pieces.  I couldn’t understand what it was doing, but I didn’t try to either.  I had decided we should leave the midget in the dust.

*

I dreamt I was walking with two fellow women workers in the country past a farmhouse with a small pond out front.  One of the women, a crippled midget, criticized me for smoking in the room where we had watched a movie earlier.  “Yeah, I’m really sorry about that,” I apologized.  I added, “I hope you won’t tell anyone,” or she telepathically communicated that I didn’t need to worry, I’m not sure which.  I saw a gigantic snake, very thick and at least 10 feet long, slither down through the grass into the pond.  It had large white diamonds on its beige skin.  I felt sure it was a poisonous water snake.  Both attracted and terrified, I pointed it out to the others.  The midget stepped into the water to see it better.  It was only then that I was struck by her similarity to a toddler.  Then she disappeared under the water.  Gone.  Could we save her?  The other woman sort of laughed and said, “She’s gone.”  I looked around for an oar or big stick, swished the water a bit, though I soon decided it was too dangerous.  We went to the farmhouse, where a party was breaking up.  People were coming out the front door.  I asked the hostess if she knew about a snake in the pond—perhaps because I only half-believed that what had happened was real—and she said, “Oh yes, that’s the python.”  “It’s killed a woman,” I said.  “That can happen,” she said, adding with a laugh, “It shouldn’t have done that.”  One of her guests, an intellectual-looking guy with dark curly hair in his 30s, like a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, burst in and said, “Hey, listen, I really gotta go now.  Let me get outta here before the police come and ask a lot of questions.  You don’t need me for that, right?”  He was in a real lather.