Inside the church of St Ignatius I wait for others to arrive.  I have been carrying around a long and skinny rooster which nestled in my arms until it tried to get a foothold and clawed at my skin.

‘Leave off,’ I said to the hen, ‘I’m happy to tote you around but not if you claw into me.’

The chook flapped off to join the other hens of whom she seemed afraid.  This hen was different.  She did not fit in.  The others sat atop the altar, perched high, more like pigeons than hens.

A priest in my dream who seemed both nun and priest was on his mobile phone asking about a new job.  He had wanted me to hang about until he was told one way or another that he had the job or not.

This decision weighed heavily on him, on me, on us.  We two were in love, much like the main characters, Father Peter Clifford and Assumpta Fitzgerald in the TV series Ballykissangel.

A priest in love with a member of his congregation.  Unthinkable, and yet, here we were.  Chaste as yet but filled with desire.

And then the head of the organization, a lay man but still religious, on his way to the priesthood, gave me instructions about how I might cut the table cloth to size.  There were rows of tables all adorned in white in readiness for Mass.

‘Could you carry the offertory things?’ he asked me, 'the bread and wine up to the altar.'

The idea unnerved me.  I had not done this before and would need to rehearse.  I wanted to be involved but I was on the periphery of belief in that I had none.  Still I relished the ritual.

The survival place started out as a hobo camp, but there were things for sale on the honour system. I was carrying my baby and we were doing okay, but we needed something like socks. Before this, we were in a room where my mom and my brother were. There was Lego on the floor, a little yellow building. My baby was there, too, and my main concern was taking care of, protecting him. I escaped into the woods with my baby—it was raining lightly. There was a very tall man whose stuff it was that was for sale. He gave or sold me something and shrunk down to a normal size. We went into a motel there on the shore of the lake. It was then that I was addressed by the name “Jack” but also realized that some people knew me as “Teddy” from an earlier time in my life when I had done something terrible—or perhaps done something I thought of as justified but which some people considered terrible. I walked through a huge complex that seemed to blend elements from hippie survival treehouse and rundown motel. My wife was there. My baby was not. The tall man was also gone. I realized that the place was being run by witches. I also realized it was the same place Teddy’s crimes had been committed, but most of the evidence of what the place really was had been covered over. I changed my hair, now extremely long, and instantly my face changed and I looked exactly like my sister. I was disguised. I showed my wife, who was at the mirror. She was not all that impressed. I escaped again into a rowboat with a woman from the Teddy era who sneered that she remembered me from then and knew what I had done. By way of denial, I said “I’m Jack,” and the rowboat now contained a somewhat unfinished-looking doppelganger of me as well, staring blankly and menacingly at the woman. “That’s Teddy.” I was on shore again, but in a car with my wife. It was still raining. We were going to a big, grey building to see about some kind of expensive medical procedure for her. When we got to the parking lot, the attendant sold us a day pass for $35. We only wanted a $5 one hour pass, so we were yelling at her, but she seemed apologetic. Inside, there was a smaller version of a common corporate coffee chain. The lineup was very long. I got in line.

"My name is Davi Det Hompson," he said, "but you can pronounce it however you want." Some in the audience thought this was audacious. Wanting some more mystery. "I'm from the southwest. One of those towns where there aren't any children. So there aren't any crows." He was sitting in Leo's desk at the new Division Leap. "The number of crows always corresponds to the number of children in a town. IT has to do with the tires. That's why I do what I did. I didn't want to 'heighten language' or have a dialogue with the potentiality of the book. But I didn't want to write poetry either. I wanted my language to seem to be alone in the desert."

I just had a dream a few hours ago where I wondered how to approach Zeus respectfully on my upcoming visit to Mount Olympus. Should I actually touch his gigantic feet or not?