The first dream (which becomes the dream within a dream):

I'm shooting a movie.  It's completely surprising because I'm the star, picked from nowhere, and my costar, is THE totally hot famous older Scottish actor.  We have to do a scene where we dance close.  We do the scene over and over.  He obsessively fingers the dimples in my lower back and whispers things like "this is where the gold collects."  This is somehow secret from the camera.  This is the best dream ever.

I wake up (still dreaming) to find myself in a resort hotel with tons of guests, very busy.  I'm in a bathing suit, with a big canvas beachbag over my shoulder, in which I carry a painting I did to capture the feeling of the movie dream.  It's my most dear posession.  I guard it carefully.  I see the actor and his wife, they part ways.  He notices that I'm carrying this painting in my bag.  He says it's his, he painted it, that I stole it.  He does not recognize me but we contest the strange mutual artifact (the painting) that links us.

Running, with the painting in my bag, I realize that I am very late for an appointment with my mother, who has set up a resorty thing for us to do: a simultaneous bungee jump out of a helicopter over the ocean.  I'm five minutes late.  It's too late to jump.  And I'm secretly glad that I missed it. 

Hi C:

I had a crazy dream last night and you were in it (as well as lots of other folks I know).  We were all at the beach (it sorta looked like Grand Manan off the coast of New Brunswick) and the water was very cold.  You spent a lot of time carefully raking up the seaweed and beach stones into small piles.  Very slowly.  It was beautiful.

Because I had this dream after finding out you have sarcoidosis, I wondered if this was a cure, or something you were supposed to do. 

In case it was a cure, I didn't want to keep the dream to myself...

Anne

The location of my reading series, Cadmium Text, suddenly changes from R&F Paints to an elementary school with tiny desks.  One of the readers cancels, so I ask Scott Helmes if he'll jump in.  He'll do it, but needs a ton of unfindable electronic equipment to display his visual poems.  Half the audience sits in the hallway outside the room, muttering.  There's no food, so I have to trudge around town (!?) looking for pizza while carrying heavy bags of poetry.  It's untenable: everything is too far, too heavy, I know no one but Scott at the reading (whom I've never met, but am collaborating with by mail IRL).

I wake up.  My already tennis-injured back seems worse.  

I was walking back home from a great meal at one of my favorite restaurants, the Global Palate,(go support - they rock!) with my tennis team and my husband, Peter. We're all wearing our salmon colored team shirts.

As we're walking back to our house, the captain of my tennis team is explaining to my husband that she has offered me "a great benefits package: two weeks off in the summer, a flexible schedule..."

At which point I'm standing in the middle of the street, surrounded by my teammates, screaming dramatically at the top of my lungs, "But I don't get PAID to play tennis. Wouldn't THAT be part of a great benefits package?"

Must have something to do with the tricky, intense match I played last night. And the fact that it's been a bazillion degrees out and I haven't slept well in days.

I dream that Peter and I are in our kitchen, getting ready to go to work.  He's wearing a burgundy colored sweatshirt and black jeans.  Everything is like it is every morning, the rustle of breakfast and coffee.  I notice that someone else walks into the room.  It's an exact copy of Peter, except he's wearing a bright blue shirt.  I barely notice for a while.  And then I can't figure it out.  We're always two, but now we're two plus a photocopy.  As I try to uncomfortably wrap my mind around the fact that I've now got two husbands, I also try to keep straight which one is the "real" one - probably the first one?  I realize that if I can just find my copy of Kathleen Fraser's When New Time Folds Up, that I'll be able to figure this out.  Then I wake up.

In actual life, I own this 19th century, linen nightgown with the original owner's name penned on it in brown ink. In my dream, I'm wearing this nightgown, and I wander outside onto our front porch. It's both summer and winter out. The moon is bright and the light is blue. I notice/remember that we cut a hole in the roof over the porch to make a little mini-Moonhenge: the moon's perfect alignment over the hole in the porch roof at a certain time of year would allow a column of light to pour onto the porch floor. I decide to lie down on the floor under the column of moonlight for magical purposes.

Then I realize that if our houseguests find me out there, I'd have a hard time explaining it, so I go back inside.

I'm walking along the edge of the old Polish cemetery that borders a golf course near the house where I grew up. I hung out here a lot when I was younger. The world is sort of blueish and wintery, cool weather that's excellent for walking. On my walk, I'm accompanied by a rabbit companion who hops along with me. I'm in paradise - perfect weather, good rabbit-y company, in an old and familiar place I love.

I get "home" (wherever THAT is) and I meet my sister-in-law L. who is upset that I'm walking. She thinks it's pathetic that I'm on foot. She tells me that she just got me a "Prius Stellata - you have no idea how rare these are and how lucky we are to find you one. It's parked on the road for you." It's not a gift exactly, and suddenly I'm saddled by a car payment. My idea of paradise is her idea of hell and needs corrrecting. I get in the car and instead of a steeringwheel, it's got a long sundial-y needle and I've got to figure out how to drive this thing. I look around for the rabbit and it's gone.

In my dream, I'm playing tennis and break a string in my racquet (in my actual life, I've NEVER broken a string - not once). I go into my tennis bag and pull out my other stick, and the strings in that racquet have turned into limp spaghetti. I decide to find my old racquets and all their strings are in some state of unplayable fray. I'm supposed to play a match...

Also, as part of the "find my old tennis racquets" section of the dream, I discover that we have entirely new and enormous rooms of the house and barn I've never seen before that are filled with someone else's stuff.

I had to get on a barge that was filled with people who had to euthanize their pets. We steamed out into the middle of the ocean, and each of us had to jump overboard and drown our pet. I jumped into the ocean with Shadow, and every time I tried to drown him, his head would pop out of the water, and he'd smile that dog smile of his and sort of laugh as if to tell me, "That was so much fun! Let's do that again!"

Dear Tig:

I had a dream about you last night. Peter and I came out to visit you in Arizona, and the land was covered in wildflowers. We hopped in the back of an old pickup truck and drove around looking at all the colors. Then we spent a lot of time collecting flowers and stripping the petals off to make heaps of petals on a white enamel counter. Oh, and I did your dishes.

Dream in 3 Successive Parts:

I was eating a bowl of small pink peony petals (conceptually peony, but blown rosebud looking), slightly browning at the edges so they HAD to be eaten. Like cereal. Out of my green/blue handmade bowl. I wondered why it wasn't a more popular breakfast food.

Then a cavernous cement-floored shop with a Grand National body up on jackstands waiting to restored.

Then my father asked me the rules to a game I never heard of. "Can't you explain it to an old man like me?" But I didn't know what he was talking about. Felt very sad.

There was a terrible apocalypse that made everyone's money sticky and no one could get their money out of the ATMs anymore. It had something to do with an anarchic, communal effort to pour maple syrup into the machines. Since apocalypses require one to make quick decisions, I had to make a split second choice about whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life indoors (in a building like the art deco American Airlines hangar at La Guardia Airport, the building with that beautiful font) or outdoors. I couldn't find Peter, so I had to make a choice that I thought he'd make so we could find each other. I choose the "indoor" option, and when I moved indoors, I could see his face pressed up against the other side of the glass. I made the wrong choice. So I begged and begged the "indoor" leaders to let Peter join us indoors, and they gave in to me. But when I ran up to meet him, I realized it wasn't Peter. It was someone impersonating my husband to get indoors and that again, I fucked up.

- dreamt I lost my entire life last night. Even my plants.

We have to go to see the Botanical Gardens. I have no idea who "we" are or what exactly the Botanical Gardens are, but it makes perfect sense. The trip occurs in a big red Hummer. I insist on riding on the roof on my stomach. I grip the edge of the roof with my legs and hands. My head is up. We're driving fast, and I have to hold on tight. It's like flying if I ever had a flying dream before. The Hummer rips down twisty, windy roads on the way to the Botanical Gardens. Everywhere, the jacaranda is blooming that pale violet grey color and the flowers are falling.

It's extremely pleasurable.

Peter and I decide to drive to Albany so I can read at an open poetry reading hosted by Pierre Joris (this sentence is odd in so many ways compared to my life). We arrive at the reading, and the site consists of several rooms. I'm shown to a tiny room where the reading will occur. The room has taken stylistic notes from the film "Brazil." There's a claustrophobic feeling, amps and wires everywhere. And I notice that there is so much equipment, there's no room for an audience. I'm told to read in that room by myself, and that I should note that I won't be recorded despite all the technological implements.

Afterward, as some sort of payment for reading to myself alone in a room filled with amps and wires, we're shown to a more expansive room that looks like a restaurant with a large raging fireplace. Many strangers wearing x-mas sweaters are gesturing and eating. Pierre Joris invites us to eat the only meal offered: "Medieval Jousting Breakfast."

When I wake up and tell Peter the dream, he asks if the meal consisted of large turkey legs swung overhead and root vegetables. "Omelettes, we had omelettes," I tell him.

I'm at the farm where I pick up organic vegetables every week. It's winter (odd), and the veggie room is lit with electric lights (odd), and an acquaintance who is a homeless-looking meadmaker is waiting around (for what?). Before I choose which vegetables I'll bring home, I look through every bin to see what's available. I'm stunned to find that the last bin is packed tightly with small pastel tote containers of Dunkin Donuts Munchkins (how do they grow these?). I'm ecstatic to slowly realize that Gertrude Stein was wrong: sugar IS a vegetable. At last... I wake up content.