I woke up from a dream in which I had a license plate that said ERIS -- which I thought in the dream meant YOU ARE, but realized upon waking that it means YOU WILL BE, or else it could be the Greek goddess of strife.

I dreamt I visited Beckett—he was living in a church on an island in Paris. I rented a rowboat from some boat people to get there, and as I went into the church I could see Beckett writing—he was sitting in the front of the church near the altar, writing on a large sheet of rice paper, but he wasn’t writing in the usual way: there was a penciled outline of a giant rose window on the rice paper, and he wrote each line within a spoke of the wheel. I couldn’t see the words as he wrote them, but the spoke lit up from within as he finished, each spoke a different color. The shape of the rose window was a little like this one in England:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rose_window_Richmond.jpg

The only line I remember him writing was “I want all my lances lined up in a row.”

Peter Lamborn Wilson wants to visit an out-of-the-way place called Mud Bay, where there's an island inhabited by rare auks, and possibly visited by Crowley before. We can't find it on the map, but we (Robert, Peter, and I) manage to locate it on GPS and drive to a gloomy-looking bay that looks like it might be near Providence. There's a ferry once a day that goes to the island. When we get there we see nothing but wasteland, a wide lane that seems to lead nowhere, a few low buildings in the distance. The inhabitants all seem to have octopus heads covered by masks in the shape of human faces, but that doesn't alarm us much. I spend the rest of the dream trying to leave the island, trying to convince Peter that we don't really need to see the auks.

I dreamt I was defending The Kindly Ones to three people who didn’t understand it. I gave a long, eloquently worded exposition of the book, putting particular stress on the chapter called “Air” – I woke up as I was in mid-sentence, discussing Genet and Bataille. As I woke up I thought to myself, Good grief, I have to defend it in my dreams even…

The night before I finished translating a 500-page sentence I dreamt I saw the last page and was devastated to see that the sentence came to an end three paragraphs before the actual end of the book. All that effort wasted, I thought. I saw the page very clearly in the dream: the long sentence coming to an abrupt end, and then three paragraphs full of short sentences after it. I woke up with a feeling of dread, which was eased when I saw that that was not actually the case: the sentence continued its sustained breathlessness to the very end of the book.

I am a witch, along with another woman who seems to be my sister. We live in a cabin in the woods, and we control the elements by swinging on a large wooden swingset. We don't want other people to discover where we live, because they would ask too many things of us. My sister and I are happy in our cabin until one day when she thinks it would be a good idea to call Death in. I am afraid at first but then I see that Death is just a door: it looks like the plastic storage shed in our back yard, but narrower, just wide enough for a person to stand inside. I enter it and see that it leads to another world that looks very different from our own but is full of the same people, only none of them remember their previous existence. I come back to this world tired of existence and feeling an aching need to end the cycle, to remember, to wake up from this long dream.

I was some sort of domestic in Flaubert's household, along with one other woman, and since Flaubert spent all day writing (standing up) outside in his garden, it was up to me to make sure he wore enough sunscreen. I felt very proud I was entrusted with this task.

A writer tells me she has ghosts in her house: the ghosts of large fish are swimming behind her baseboards, making loud thumping noises as they go.

All of our excess books (we have a lot of books) magically appeared neatly shelved in a grove of trees about half a mile from our house. It made perfect sense for them to be there, and somehow we knew it was our personal library, and couldn't be used by anyone else. Rain didn't seem to be an issue.

We are in England and we come across three people -- two men and one woman, all very young -- who are producing a TV series on the Civil War, based on a poem by the famous poet Cecil Blakeley. They're making everything by hand -- not just the sets and costumes, but the cameras and technical equipment too. I tell them they should use the Civil War poem by Robert Kelly instead, but as I'm saying it I realize Robert has never written an epic poem on the Civil War. They shoot at night and make things during the day. They tell me they only have a certain number of hours in which to finish the epic. "American hours are shorter than English hours," I say. One of the men is distantly related to the woman -- they come from the same small island off the northern English coast -- the name sounds like Farquelay. When we see them it's 12:50 AM and the actors are starting to appear on the set, including one man with long hair dressed as a medieval knight, carrying a small digital camera.

I sit down next to Sartre at an outdoor table at a café in India. I'm not sure where exactly -- it looks a little like New Delhi. Definitely a large city. Sartre, apparently, has not died but has moved to India because he prefers the warmer climate. He looks quite young. He points to the newspaper open on the table in front of him (The Times of India) and says how glad he is that they've finally found a cure for tuberculosis.

A lot of people are in a large hall with cushions in front and chairs in the back and a movie screen on the wall facing the audience. Ann Lauterbach comes in and starts narrating a black-and-white silent film she had made called Derek and Nora's Tumble. We see a boy and a girl in their teens falling sort of haphazardly down a hill. Godard comes in and sits on one of the cushions. Ann explains the deeper meaning of the film -- falling and redemption -- and points out symbols in the various scenes that we hadn't noticed before.

I dreamt I was in some sort of hotel or boarding house with many floors. I was just moving in and my luggage was stored in someone else's room. When I go into the room I see John Ashbery there picking up his luggage. He sees lying on an end table a piece of yellow silk charmeuse with a ribbon attached to the top so it can be hung like a banner or a prayer flag. On the silk is typed a long Shakespeare monologue, but I couldn't see which one – it was about the length of "To be or not to be," with the same sort of line lengths. He looks up smiling from reading it and says it reminds him of a beach in England where there are very long waves – I can't remember the name of the beach, but it began with H. Hellespont? Anyway, H_____ Beach was famous for its surfers but especially for a group of blind surfers that surfed only there. JA said that the imagery in the monologue was just like seeing the blind surfers at H______ Beach.

I dreamt the poet Tom Meyer sent me an e-mail asking me what I thought of this passage from a recent book by the famous British Blanchot scholar Melvyn More (a woman who wrote in French and was translated into English by someone else): "It is imperative that we interpret everything that happens in life from a Blanchotean perspective. [Or: It is imperative that we see everything in life the way Blanchot would see it.] Everything is a door."

Robert and I are at a sort of New-Age seminar at a huge manor house in the Dolomites, hosted by Umberto Eco. The sort of people are there who I hear live at Damanhur, the place run somewhere in Northern Italy by an alchemist named Falco. Umberto Eco, however, does not look like himself but rather like Agamben, if you took the way Agamben appears in Pasolini's St. Matthew Passion and aged him about 30 years and added steel-rimmed glasses. Eco is lecturing on hermeticism, and he said something profound which I remember thinking (in the dream) I had to remember, but of course forgot. The manor house has been in Eco's family for generations, and is made up of many rooms that are contiguous but at odd angles -- the house is built into the mountainside (Damanhur again), overlooking a wide stream in which a large cat is swimming on its back. The rooms are very large but the bedrooms very small and sparsely furnished, in white. I spend most of the dream going from room to room, marvelling at how vast the house is -- it seems as big as the mountain -- and how the rooms never seem to end. I wake up wishing I had a large manor house with room that are uninhabited.