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.