In my dream I was watching an opera on television. Already this was strange, as in waking life I'm utterly uninterested in opera. It appeared to be a nineteenth-century Italian opera. A pair of twins—short, fat, bald, dark Sicilian-looking men in Renaissance costume—were singing an aria in unison. I knew that they were singing about guilt, but I don't know whether this was because I understood the words or was familiar with the libretto. Then I realized that one of the twins had just realized that the other twin was not his brother at all, but rather a manifestation of his own guilty conscience.

At this point, Roberto Benigni, the Italian comic actor, appeared on stage singing the same aria. He seemed startled and upset by the presence of the bald twins. He made exaggerated comic gestures that signaled his fear, as if in a silent film comedy. He ran to the back of the set and hid behind a curtain, then peeked out at the twins with an ambiguous smile on his face. At this point I could tell that Benigni had realized that the twins were not real people, but rather representations of his own guilt. This liberated him to leap out from behind the curtain and continue singing his aria. The twins had disappeared. 

The perspective in the dream then shifted from the stage set on TV to the room in which I was watching the program. There was another man in the room, sitting in a chair with his back to me. He was a large, bald man. I had no idea who he was.

"What am I feeling guilty about?" I said to the back of the man's head.

A longstanding, recurring dream about tornados appeared in a new form last night. This time it came in waves, and I was caught guard down with nowhere to be except in the place I was standing. I lay on the floor and waited...

photo by Elizabeth Bryant

Susan Legind collage, "It Was Just a Dream," as posted to Collagistes Collective on Facebook:

A dream where I cannot sleep and end up at my psychoanalyst’s house. She is doing a dance of some kind of dance to demonstrate something to me, to elaborate on something she had used words to say earlier. Also her husband is there. He is an older man with gray hair and a beard, bald and in a disheveled state. He is sitting at their computer and uploading songs to something like a USB or an iPod, and says something about doing it for her because of the road trip she or they are taking soon. Later we are standing on her balcony and discussing music, and she is telling me why she loves the composer she had danced to earlier, and I say “so you don’t like the atonal stuff?” and she shakes her head. The composer she likes is a man with an n and an o in his name but that’s all I can remember. I stumble around their house in the early dawn with the light dim and everything kind of blue in her apartment. Her son and his wife are sleeping in one room. I don’t get to the room she and her husband with grey hair and beard are in. I end up outside in an area that is vaguely Milwaukee’s east side Oakland Avenue-ish. I end up back home with an electronic device near my bed which is very low to ground.

Last night I dreamed I went to the White House to meet Obama and he took me down in the elevator into this hi-tech sub-basement and showed me his vintage collection of centuries-old breakfast cereals. They were all sitting out in the open on a steel table, and each one was in a weird sack or bag with buffalo bill steampunk letting printed on the package. He said "I try a different one every morning."

Dreamed that two poets "covered" (remixed? remade?) Bombyonder, one as a graphic novel and the other as a vinyl LP.

I had a dream that was basically a game like candy crush saga but instead of candy there were words and you had to slide them around to make lines of poems

I definitely do NOT want to open a bar called Apathy + Protest for the 27-28 yr old demographic, but that's what I dreamed I was doing

Dream that eyelashes were falling out or in some places, ingrown. Got tweezers from an old woman at a party. Woke up before I was about to stick the tweezers into my eye. Un Chein Analou redux? Oedipus?

Just before sleep Carla reminded me that yesterday was the anniversary of my father's death. I promptly dreamt that a book on biopolitics cited him, thanking him for answering queries on the point of death. When I woke up, I started to look for that book, then realized it had been a dream. Then realized the whole scenario was a dream: the stroke left my father paralyzed, without speech; there was no answering queries at that point. (Even so, I'd really like to find the book.)

was left at the altar in this morning's dream

I'm having an affair. The guy carries 3 guns & wears a bra. He is New Jersey governor Chris Christie. Did I mention this was a dream?

Had a dream last night that I had a tiny silk moth that followed me around as a pet; I would have to tell people to be careful not to sit on it or inadvertently crush it. It understood human speech, but only Japanese.

I had a dream last night; I was hovering over giant mountains of ice and snow and could move at will...it was breathtaking and beautiful and like nothing I had ever seen (except in other dreamscapes). At first I wasn't afraid but it was so "out of this world" I became fearful, and woke up.

i dreamt i was on a battleship. as we descended into the hold and the walls shook as the missiles were deployed, we passed a door behind which the composer Steve Reich was working on a project called "Sun."

I dreamt I was walking briskly away from a guy with whom I had just talked briefly.  I passed my wife, Louisa, who was standing waiting in a large, dim living room.  I said to her, “I’m going to lock myself in there and try to figure out something.”  I closed the bedroom door behind me and quickly locked it.  It was very clear to me the guy was going to follow me, soon, and stab me to death with a knife.  I looked around for a weapon.

*

I dreamt I was returning to the place where I had committed a murder in a previous dream.  I was afraid I had left my gun and my black leather traveling bag at the scene of the crime, and I wanted to retrieve them.  I knew it was a bad idea to go back, it could backfire on me.  And it might not matter if the gun were found.  Still, I was going back.  I was crossing through backyards like in my hometown of South Orange, N.J., behind the Gianottas’ house.  What if some kids saw me by the house where the murder took place?  I bent low to the ground.  The house itself was like a place in one of those impoverished Buffalo neighborhoods that Sam Truitt and I drove through a few months ago.  I entered the back of the house and then, to the left, an alley-like room where the murder had occurred.  Neither the gun nor bag was there.  The room was trashed, filled to shin level with balls of crumpled paper.  Leaving, I passed a real-estate lady out back, already showing the place.  Life was “moving on” surprisingly rapidly after the murder.  This is a dream idea I’ve had before, the murder that’s never really investigated, which derives from Gombrowicz’s Pornographia and Bolano’s 2666.

*

I dreamt that my college friend Gary Lovesky and some of his friends had visited me.  Now, they were leaving in their car.  Back inside the large house, a summer rental, a woman said I had missed a phone call.  I was waiting for a call.  I was waiting to hear my mother had died.  I almost yelled at the woman: “I was right outside.  Why didn’t you call outside for me?”  The phone rang again.  The woman answered it.  Something bad had happened, but not pertaining to me.  The woman’s face teared up.  It turned out a member of the Read family of Winter Harbor had been killed.  I thought it was a sailing accident.  But then, in a vision within the dream, I saw an explosion at a pizza shop send its huge stainless steel oven flying out the back wall, where it crushed the Read scion.  As I started to leave the living room, like our “first living room” at my childhood home in South Orange, a guy said something unpleasant to me.  “Shut up until you do some dishes,” I lashed back.  I returned to the kitchen sink, where I was finishing cleaning up after a big dinner.  Some punks followed me into the kitchen and said I was going to get beat up.  I agreed heartily, “No way I’m strong enough to beat him up,” which took them aback.  In a large added-on room with a high triangular ceiling, a young yachtsman began talking to me about races.  He said that in high seas rocks could slide off the coast and jump a couple of times, posing a real danger of smashing your boat.  He headed off to another race.  Then, in this large room, an action hero appeared.  My pursuer came to the entrance of the room.  The campy hero leaped on him, crushed him and then strode through a narrow doorway, with Slim or Thin written on the back of his robe, and someone saying, “That’s why they call him Thin.”  Pursuers set off after the action hero.  I followed their dogs, which tracked him into the sewers like in the movie “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.”  They seemed to lose his track, but then they spotted small tracks on the wet floor, turtle tracks.  A woman pointed to a small drain, said a turtle could escape through there.  It worried me for a second.  Then, something eased my worries.

*

I dreamt I was at a big suburban house like my childhood home.  The doorbell rang.  A delivery guy was there with a huge box, too large for me to carry inside.  Luckily, the delivery guy was a real muscleman—and acrobat, spiderman and human butterfly.  He leaped into the air and stuck to the wall in the front hall, nearly naked now, flexing garish muscles with tattoos.  In the process, he had become much smaller, half the size of a human.  He left the box in a hallway that didn't exist at the Montrose Ave. house.  I couldn't move it.  Later, it turned out that what had arrived was a large, furry dog, almost motionless.  They've all tricked me into getting a dog, I thought.  I didn't feel that I could return it. 

Last night, I dreamt I was attending a "baton twirling" conference & I was staying in a boarding house & I caught TS Eliot at midnight stealing doughnuts from the kitchen & he shyly apologized & then murmured "you can call me 'El'"

I was on the roof of a hotel in New York with my friend Ryan Wugalter. We were  looking at the stars and talking, when suddenly there was an intense meteor shower. When it was over, we climbed down a long yellow ladder with a rickety fold-out section called a “keith.”   At the bottom of the ladder, we met up with several other people, mostly our friends from university. We all walked down the wide, cushy hotel halls to a Japanese restaurant that made you a pay a cover charge that was different for "public" or "private" seating; we paid for the cheaper public seating, and it meant we sat with strangers, so we lost a fair bit of our party at this point. The food was rows of little nubbins like plasticine. When we left, I had trouble getting all my correct checked stuff: bag, sweater. I had my laptop case with a shirt and a bunch of books, I think. There was a Japanese bookstore. I told the worker in the store that I couldn’t read Japanese, although I thought the lettering was beautiful.   Next I was eating breakfast in a ground floor apartment in New York when first my mom, and then a stand-in for my mom, had a new boyfriend who was demonic. He was a professor, and he had long, white goat ears. They disappeared after I complimented him on them. I decided to pray, which filled the room with a golden light, and as I continued, it caused the demon professor to melt into a greasy puddle, which eventually disappeared. There were also two little kids there who were demonically afflicted, and I prayed for them, but it was only partly effective.   inoticed on the deck or terrace that my wife was tied up and being tortured by a gang of youths. I brutally beat a few of them trying to save her, picking them up by the legs and swinging them, smashing their heads into hard surfaces.

Dreamed a new federal law required all TSA screeners to be fluent in the work of Philip K. Dick.

In my dream last night I was on another planet and was receiving a lesson, or being told how impractical it was that we lived on Earth in flesh suits that you couldn't take off. I was shown how on their planet you could unzip your flesh suit easily, or sometimes you didn't wear the suit at all. So I did this, and all of my organs were being interviewed, as if each organ was an individual, going to the doctor, getting a "check-up." I completely understood how sane it was to want to see your own machinery, so as to visibly register when something had gone askew. When I woke up, I began to think of the development of technology, of the covering of internal parts, so as to no longer see what was moving what, to no longer be able to dismantle a human being or a machine into parts, a seamless diaphanous flesh, which makes me think of hacking, and the retaliation against the surveillance of one surface, and the persistent action of breaking if not the human body, then all of matter, into discrete, and separatable elements.

Had a weird convoluted dream last night in which Charles Bernstein was explaining to me that home craft projects go much better if one makes one's own Elmer's Glue!

Had an amazing dream last night where I was hanging out with my friends Trish Harnetiaux, Jason Pendergraft, and Corey Stoll. Just like our early days in New York except everyone was famous, Jason smoked a cigar, and there was an elevator that went to the moon.

Last night I dreamed that cats attacked my hands after entering my wood paneled bedroom during a hurricane. My hands were scratched up and bloody. The cats sat on the bed hissing.

Dreamed last night I was in Louisville, to deliver a lecture I hadn't yet written, & was visiting Guy Davenport on a dark, snowy evening. He was congenial as ever--if strangely overweight--& excited to show me that he'd gotten rid of most of his vast library. Some walls were simply bare; other bookcases were absolutely groaning with newly acquired gardening books---big illustrated volumes devoted to particular families of flowers and plants.

two nights ago dreamed that I was out working in our tiny linear container garden along the side of the house when I glanced up and saw this huge, lovely turned garden plot in our back yard that I had never noticed before. "Why haven't we just been using that?" I asked Sikkema.

dreamed I unwrapped something like a Klondike bar and dropped its contents into a stream. Inside were three small blocks that turned into "Medusa swans" when they touched the water. I said, "they'll take care of the corpses."

last night i dreamed everyone had GIFs for tattoos, which made walking around distracting and dangerous...the next thing i know i was in line at the bank (which is weird b/c i haven't been inside a bank in years), when i finally got to the window, the teller was talking but only images came out of his mouth, and i was like WTF!, and the person behind me in line whispers "yeah, that guy only speaks in GIFs"

In the dream I seemed only slightly perplexed that I was growing a singular horn.

In my dream, some critter like a mad possum bit my finger and it hurt so much I woke up. My finger hurt like hell when I woke up, but no clue why or how.

dream: my father tries to call me from the airport. i answer the wrong phone. u tell me we have roosters, rabbits and a guinea pig. maybe a parrot. i don't want roosters. i'm in the men's dorm by mistake. they are all naked. i try to pretend like i don't notice. our apt. is leaking. i try to get towels. i'm twisted in an awkward position between tables and a man. i pry myself loose. a young girl is doing a television interview. she is wearing a black leotard. her breast is exposed and she doesn't know it. i think she will be so embarrassed. why didn't they edit it out. i want to tell her someone was videotaping me dancing once and the same thing happened to me. i never got to see the video for some reason. i am walking in a city. maybe it's santa cruz. i am so happy to be home where there is some activity, some life. the ocean air feels wonderful. i don't know if you're there or not.

Perhaps I have been thinking too much about a new project, which is about resistance against the compelling conviction that I am not allowed to stay. I dreamt of light. That a person I once loved wanted me to catch it and if I refused I would be killed. I managed to escape before the walls closed in and began hastily throwing my suitcases into the minivan. But there was no room for me. And so I ran to catch the train. Of course, when I arrived it politely passed by without me: Excuse me, miss. I resigned myself to die.

I dreamed my throat was crammed with sticks & I kept pulling them out one by one but there were always more.

dreamed I was taking an intro creative writing class, first day, and the instructor asked us all to free-write about "homes" from different perspectives, and I wrote down the words RED HOUSE and then started daydreaming, and when she called on my to read mine aloud and I said I hadn't really finished anything, she made fun of me and rolled her eyes and I wanted to say, "I have published several books, you know!" But I did not because RED HOUSE.

I also dreamed I had a pair of pet raccoons I had to carry around with me everywhere in a double-sided cage; they had these long teeth, though, that I had to file down every day the way you'd sharpen a knife, holding the raccoons and running their teeth up and down the cage's stone edges.

Triple nightmare last night: some kind of hippy family invaded my home from the hill above, threatened to sue me when I asked them to leave. I escaped them in my car but noticed the brakes completely stopped working, so I coasted through the lights which miraculously each turned green until I came to a stop on a hill. Then all these drivers started yelling at me to get my car out of the street. Things started to get ugly until we all got distracted by a giant rocket flying low around the city. We realized it was a nuclear missile and waited for the the detonation. But I did look up at the hill at my house, and the hippy family was gone.

There were two little red monkeys leaping back and forth over a snowy road. I somehow snapped the corner off my handheld communication device, but it still worked, and looked like molten glass and agate inside. A blond man in a white van made big gestures, which I pretended not to notice. A child was about to tell me something important, but we were interrupted when I woke.

In my dream I was listening to a generic vinyl reprint of a record by an early seventies glam band named Trash, a song called "We Can Take the Underground." It was pretty good.

dreamed I unwrapped something like a Klondike bar and dropped its contents into a stream. Inside were three small blocks that turned into "Medusa swans" when they touched the water. I said, "they'll take care of the corpses."

I had a Wes Anderson dream last night, that we bought an apartment on the top floor of the "Hotel Violin," (too much time spent with a violin restorer recently?). The building was an architectural dessert: art nouveau, gold leaf, pastels. The elevator didn't make it up to the top floor, so we took it as far as it went, pried the doors open, to go higher.

dream: with a wave of my hand the cyst on my chest falls off. then there is a parade on the beach in aptos. what is it for? a celebration of life. it is on my beach. it is going in the right direction. i dream inside my dream. i tell someone about my dream inside my dream but i am still dreaming. the back of an indian's head. black hair. denim jacket. i don't know who u are. everything is going to be fine. i have 3 male roommates. i've never seen them before. who told u u could live here. i don't want new roommates. i don't want to live with men. there is too much male energy in this house. i want u to leave. i wanted to be alone. i wanted peace and quiet. i'm sorry but u can't live here. i am trying to reach vhs tapes high on a dusty shelf. i can't quite reach them without maybe falling off the stepladder and breaking my neck. i take 3 little sample bottles of clinique lotion and an open nail polish bottle and throw them away. women are shopping. they are very fashionable. my mother says she wants to go shopping. women are buying bracelets. i don't like anything cold around my wrist. one is wearing a weird purple flowery hat. they are not finding what they are looking for. do they wear make-up or not and do they dance. can i still dance. i'm a bit shaky on my feet. i pick up a leather wallet that is kind of a book. it is a sample of a bookmaking class. the cashier says the class is in las vegas. why am i in nevada? i don't want to be in nevada. the air is clean. i don't care, i want to go to the beach. i want to go home. why is it taking so long to go home.

Morning. Rained a lot last night. I dreamt the house was lost to a sinkhole.

I dreamed I was a guest on a show called "Adam Lambert's Poetry Hour, Starring Adam Lambert."

Ching-In Chen, in a dream I had last night, I told you I was having trouble writing, and you asked if I would take dictation on a typewriter on a tour of readings you were doing with a bunch of women I didn't know. The readings were going to be improvised and the sound of the typewriter was an important cuing device to help everyone know what to say and how to say it. We hadn't gotten started yet, when I woke up, but I was really excited about the whole thing.

I dreamt I designed my own community college. It was nestled into the side of a mountain like a Tibetan monestery. The whole front was glass. I was some famed architect and innovator of new wave educational spaces. There were a lot of open areas. Dangling media for heads and bodies. Seriously. I could draw it for you. 2 things: my father was an architect; 2. I've been doing this too long. Help me.

I dreamed I won an octopus. A small octopus who volunteered to be raffled and eaten. I felt like there was a moral conflict eating an octopus who wanted to die. I also didn't know how to eat the octopus. I salted & ate some tentacles. Then I misplaced the rest before I could finish it.

dreamed all night I had black baby goat who was always hungry. He followed me around from dream to dream! Maybe I was just mythologizing Bruno the cat.

in my dreams I'm angrily flying and singing, like Lucifer on Broadway

dreamed i was teaching in an auditorium for 4 classes of kids, talking about Hugo Ball's sound poetry, and i moved around the room between the rows, at one point sitting down next to David Hadbawnik while the progressively more unruly kids were chaperoned by Jennifer Moxley & Steve Evans... and then outside, calling Gilbert Joyce on the phone while a flock of guinea fowl broke into their cacophonous song. dreams like this are the good kind of weirdos.

Last night Kathy Acker returned from the dead to give a talk on what it is like to be dead in the most impressive dream of my first sleep in the tripwire shed (still bearing the scent of CA Conrad's recent stay there)

dreamed Prez Bush porn leaked and I bugged everyone at party for the link Frank Sherlock said YEAH HE WANTS TO WATCH THAT ONE ALONE NO DOUBT
YES George W. Bush was a terrible president and terrible man
BUT HE'S A LOOKER!!
I wrote this little love poem for him some years ago: http://thedearmrpresidentpoem.blogspot.com

Fever back up to 101 and my fever dream is thus: blind doctor- shaman searches the apartment for the tiny totem that will make me feel better. He touches every surface and inside every cup and jar and case and behind all objects as I shake with chills , waiting patiently. At one point he finds an acorn that Sylvie hid in a jar, and he considers it, then replaces it. He is endlessly searching, and never finds it.

Last night I had a dream where Zach Houston and I were standing on a street corner and a municipal car drove by quickly then abruptly stopped at a stop sign. The car dropped off a selection of tools that needed to be there. At the moment that the tools were dropped off, the car completely disappeared, popped out of the atmosphere exactly at the place where it parked. Zach and I were in shock. We turned to the left and a skinny brunette, a young girl wearing white pants acting very aristocratic brushing her hair--we ask her if she saw that. She has no idea what we are talking about and continues to act nonchalant. Zach and I both feel ourselves as "poets" and a conscience sinks in our throats signalling to us that this now marks us off as a species, with the capacity to see the evils of empire more than others because we have conditioned the capacity and the willingness to transform it, so we walked forward into the auspicious omens of the tech take over, understanding "our difference." ......Last night when I was walking to the reading at ATA I was taking in Valencia and the Buddhism and Cognitive Science conference I had been to the day before and asked myself what power of mind poets have that "techies" (scientists) don't? It was at that moment that a small old shaking woman with bloodshot eyes handed me a miniature pamphlet called "The Power of God."

Last night I had a dream I was a ghost, in Italy.

I was just in a plane crash in my dream. But I saw the earth from the window so not a usual plane. It was so serene I told my mother sitting next to me to sleep we would be home soon. Everyone seemed to be asleep and as I was drifting off there was suddenly the announcement that there was a fatal malfunctioning. The plane was going to crash and very quickly. To hold your loved ones and if you were an artist you'd probably cry. As I turned to my mother at the moment of death it gripped me so quickly I felt my mind dive through worlds.

I had a dream last night that I discovered an old lost book by Emily Dickinson, and the poems were long and wild and narrative and beautiful and I could barely breathe.

Last night I woke up in Dick Cheney's house and frantically ran through some desolate labyrinth of mud fields and construction zones wearing only a 1990's happy face tank top. I woke up again at 2 AM in my own room, cold sweat.

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My home planet is undone by cataclysm. I am not certain of the root cause, but the planet no longer rotates, leaving it cold/dark on the one side and burned-beyond-life on the other. All of the remaining beings from the world are floating in a small clutch in space about a mile or two above the dark-side of the planet which is no longer a coherent ball, but more like chunks of mountain and valley compressed into an enormous-eroded fist. It looks like an ironstone version of a Lake Taihu stone set against deep space. Where there should be stars, there is only cosmic dust and gas reflecting the errant sun — the word ‘errant’ is spelled out before me in script, sparkler-style. A collective keening has just begun when I am pulled into shifting dimensions by a force that is amplified by a kind of ululating that breaks down the walls of space/time as we go. ‘She’ says, ‘We are late to the party.’

She and I apparate onto a barren plateau in a numinous dimension where a vast army is gathered. She introduces me to one of her lieutenants as ‘one of us.’ The lieutenant is an Aleut, his/her 8 sets of ears are half funnel-eared bat/half human. Without signal, the ‘collective’ begins a screaming/roar — the air shatters as the present disintegrates/burns away.

I am levitating up near the ceiling of an archaic, vaulted library — it appears to be carved out of the side of a mountain — I’m not yet quite sure which book I’ve been sent to retrieve.

.

1.

Forrest Gander, who is my former advisor, is looking at a shopping cart in a large parking lot. The front of the cart is facing him. There is a crowd around him, myself included. He is wearing an old school white nightgown that comes down to his ankles. He is psyching himself up for running and jumping (long ways) over the cart). He is barefoot. He runs a short distance and leaps up over the cart but his foot just barely touches the handle bar and he comes down on his hands and knees. Everyone rushes to help him up and I am moving his arm to get under him and lift. He was scratched up but fine. His eyes were huge like Montgomery Burns after his Friday night treatments on The Simpsons.

2. 

Another famous poet, who I won't name, is in what appears to be a high school hallway- very wide, etc. There is a man with a violin case (is there a violin in there? who knows) and this famous poet snatches the case, walks down the hall and slides the case into an office. "12000 of those things now."

She and I have some kind of side conversation but then we go and join a larger group. "It's about time I moved up in the conversation," she said to herself or me, maybe.

Dreamed that it was pitch dark and I was in bed with a poet. A chapbook rang, it was his cell phone. I woke him so he could take the call. He agreed to meet the woman on the other end, but this made him upset about money. He said he had to leave. I was glad to see him go. I didn't know what I was doing in bed with him anyhow.

Dreamed that I had sent a letter for help to a friend. My friend wrote me back, but did so in a code, because where I was being held was not safe. The code was made of long strips of typewriter ribbon, but each strip was gibberish. I realized that if I cut the strips the same length as a page, taped them to a wall, and read VERTICALLY, I could read my friend's note for me. His message was to take courage and to write him at his mother's address from now on. I cried at his thoughtfulness. He came to me later, and we hugged over an antique banister. He was short and muscly and in a white tank top.

GABA seems to give me intense dreams. I found the perfect house that was both in NY and Tokyo. It had a tatami room and a basic circular shape, with sections sunken or elevated and it was surrounded by a forest. It was a little funky but also beautifully remodeled with orangey kitchen cabinets and a beautiful desk with an oval edge looking out into the trees. There were delicate viney hanging plants everywhere. The owners had left the door so I spent a night there sneakily in the tatami room. It was perfect. The next day was the open house though and it was thronged including some of my friends, including Rob and Kim. Of course they thought it was perfect too, which distressed me; couldn't they see it was more perfect for //me//? I went up to the owner and told him I was totally guileless in bargaining but that I would do anything to get the amount of money necessary to buy the house. He had a slightly 80s look like a slighter Philip glass, curly hair and circles under his eyes, maybe wearing a black suit jacket, and he just nodded and said mysteriously that I'd been doing the right things...somewhere outside the house I met Gary's grandparents who shook their head over him and were so glad to meet me (in earth life they have long not existed and I never met them)...then yesterday morning I dreamed I had to pack really quickly to go to Cambodia for five days to give a presentation... Cambodia! What wishes and slippages I have been privy to!

In the dream I had last night I was crossing the road in East London--I think it was Mile End Road, when I literally bumped into Rene Ricard. He was carrying a load of notebooks and other personal items. He pushed them into my hands, saying, I think you could use these. I walked on with them and went into a pub where I could sit down and look at them. I was well aware that what had just happened was extraordinary since I knew in the dream that he had died. And I felt that it was extraordinary that I had been chosen to receive these things since although I had met Rene I did not "know" him. Apparently the pub that I'd gone into was one where he was a regular because the people there recognized that the stuff I had was his and they asked about it. They didn't show suspicion but wonderment. The next thing I remember was that I was at my friend Scott Lash's house, still with Rene's stuff, explaining to him what had happened, but he didn't know who Rene was and I had to explain it to him. On waking, I began to wonder if he had ever actually spent any time in London. I somehow doubt it.

as posted to facebook on 2.15.14

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In the first part I invented a fire alarm. I made a large effigy of a man and dressed him in bright scarlet pajamas and night cap. I suspended the effigy from the ceiling by a rope noosed around its neck, and then I pinned it to the ceiling with a beam pressed into its stomach. If the house caught fire, the beam, which was made of highly inflammable material, would burn up quickly, allowing the effigy to swing down, crash through a high window, and hang outside the house. Passersby would see a big scarlet-clad dummy hanging out the window and know there was a fire inside. (I've already applied for a patent, so don't try to steal this idea.)

In the second part I was carrying my acoustic guitar down West Court Street in Flint, MI, my home town. I was going to practice in a graveyard, as is my wont. I passed a big Catholic church with a bunch of Hispanics pouring in and out. A young man came up to me and asked me in Spanish if he could see my guitar. I gave it to him, knowing that he was going to show off his virtuosity. Sure enough, he started playing a bluesy number so beautifully—as beautifully as anyone could on my low-end guitar--that everyone stopped to listen, and when he finished they all cheered and applauded. I took back my guitar, thanked him, and hurried on, hoping he wouldn't ask me to play.

In the third part I was attending a big university, and my next class was on another campus or a remote corner of the same campus. I got on a shuttle bus, but when it took an unexpected turn I realized that I'd boarded the wrong one. The bus started speeding down the freeway away from the university, however. I knew I was going to miss my class and end up in a strange, distant place. (This part is a recurring dream for me.)