Last night I dreamed it was snowing again thick blankets of it and a woman was floating around my house in a orange caftan an intruder and I dreamed I jumped out of bed to wash my hands and the soap turned into chocolate chip cookie dough and I felt dirty.

Last night oh god I dreamed I was Henry watching from the outside a very very exclusive and expensive boys' school. All the boys were dressed in white satin in the manner of the 18th century courts and they sat in a row of white chairs holding white violins with the strings outward (Henry never play violin as far as I know but there is a bass violin in one of his paintings) and the boys' left hands were draped casually over the top of the violins' scrolls and they slouched in their finery and laughed among themselves and teased one another in the manner of the wealthy and spoilt. When their teacher sounded a tuning fork several of the boys' heads came right off and went zooming around the room and the rest of the students got quiet. I was writing everything down as Henry. Alone and watching trying not to get caught.

Last night I dreamed of blankets of snow falling thick and white and silent and other little weirdnesses trying to get in trying to make their way into my brain. Our room is high up and I refuse to shut the curtains because I love the sound of the city and so and so I freeze. Yesterday three of the four terminals at O'Hare lost power completely and no one knows why.

Last night I dreamed I was living in an apartment attached to a restaurant. I walked out on the terrace of the apartment and outside was a long reflection pool kind of like the one at the Washington Monument only shorter and in it up close were two baby orca whales and they were swimming back and forth rubbing their bodies against each other and I told the owner of the apartment and she said she had to get rid of them and I went out onto the terrace again and there were two huge boulders and on each boulder was a giant pulsing pink octopus and I told the owner again about them and the third time I went out to the terrace someone had thrown a black and white live cow into the pool and the whales were feeding on it eating chunks from its side. I ran in to find the apartment owner but she wasn't around so I ran back outside to find her putting two bird cages in the pool and in each cage was a cat and she was pushing them out into the middle of the pool so I jumped in and rescued them.

Before I went to bed my cell phone rang and the little screen read AT&T Billing and I thought maybe I owned them money so I answered and it was my mother. I don't know how she got my number. I gave it to the hospital when she was there so maybe they gave it to her. I don't relish the idea of her having it but at least I know not to answer when the weird AT&T thing is on the little screen. I am positive it was my mother in the dream.

Last night I dreamed it was night and there was a knock at my front door and it was a skinny man dressed like Santa sort of with suspenders and a fedora and he handed me a tiny piece of paper like a fortune cookie fortune and asked if I was Rebecca and I said who are you and he said he was a bill collector so I slammed the door in his face. When I turned around I noticed my Christmas tree was full of burnt old frying pans and I knew my mother had shoved them in there. And damn now I can't remember the rest of the dream.

I was punished with a nightmare from the culinary gods last night because I ate a cream cheese and cranberry sandwich very late. In my dream I was with some weird woman small with dark hair who very much wanted to be my friend. She begged me to go to dinner with her it seemed urgent. I told her I was a vegetarian I made it very clear. We were then in some old part of the city shadowy and dangerous and climbed up a bunch of stairs to a dark night club. We sat at a table and I felt something by my foot. It was a black corrective shoe the kind misshapen with cracked leather and I had to lift it to the table to get my dinner. Once I did that I was brought a drink in a shot glass bourbon I think and I drank it quick then I a oily man brought a platter of what looked like sushi but some of it had orange fringes like sea creatures and some looked vegetable in nature. I ate part of one and it seemed okay. The next course was a cat lying on a bed of rice. It was a black cat looked exactly like Paris the Genius Cat. The chef came out and insisted it was dead because I was stroking him. His one golden eye was open staring at me in pain but he couldn't make any noise. I got up and started a fight with the cashier telling them I was going to report them to the police.

I dreamed of my grandfather's boathouse last night like a little log cabin on Lake Pend Oreille with the boat slip attached the boat rocking in green lights and the giant carp underneath. I was in a feather bed in the house with a beautiful man with light shooting out of his blue blue eyes (a family trait) I was holding his face in both my hands (this is the second time I've done this in a dream in two weeks) telling him how beautiful he was and he was telling me we were some kind of cousins and the boathouse belonged to him now but it was okay for us to have sex. Creepy except I loved that boathouse with my whole goddamned heart and still do and I can recall every inch of it and the boat slip and the boat every inch is like a slide show in my head and that boathouse is a place I go when I am falling.

Last night I dreamed for the entire night that I was sewing. Red satin dresses. Blue silk dresses. I was sewing them all by hand tiny perfect stitches. Right before I woke I dreamed I was sewing an intricate deep chocolate brown velvet Victorian hat. I was busy busy busy. I believe this dream means prosperity is coming my way that I can make it happen by believing.

Yesterday after visiting the hospital twice in a week to give blood I decided I would like an Advocate. I'm not sure what they are but lots of people in queue to give blood had them. I wrote about it extensively last night then deleted the post. Last night I dreamed my Advocate appeared and she was a chubby cross between Patty Duke from the Patty Duke Show including the headband and June Cleaver except she wasn't sweet as she appeared she was all business with had a soft speaking voice and a sweet demeanor. She was my Janus coming to visit. She had a huge book with plastic pages a scrap book that I never got to peek into but apparently it held the story of my life or a version of the story. Before I knew it I was on trial for being broke. My mother was there my father and his wife my step father and they were to be my jury. I asked my son to go hide in the closet and the Patty Duke/June Cleaver Advocate Janus began to question me. I answered her honestly but the screaming from the jury overtook my words every time I defended myself the jury screamed and shouted and fought. Finally  my Advocate asked me what about music? And I started to answer and realized my clock radio had gone off. I considered hitting the snooze button and sleeping another half hour but I was afraid to go back into that version of home sweet home. I woke in tears which sucks when you have a cold got up made some tea and crawled back into bed to watch Inspector Gadget on one of the invisible channels that come through at odd times when you don't have cable television. When I got out of bed to go to work I hugged my son who was not raised in a screamy house. I told him the dream. It made me cry again so  I'm putting it here to let it grow leathery awful wings and fly away.

November 8, 2010

Last night I dreamed of rolling in snow like a puppy.

November 3, 2010

Last night I had two dreams that felt important. In the first I was painting women in blue dresses on a large canvas and every time I'd finish a woman she'd float off the canvas and up to the sky. Pretty obvious I guess. In the second dream there were two men in tuxedos side by side. The man on the left was holding a gold plate full of bees. The man was on the right was playing a viola de gamba. The music coming from the viola de gamba was the sound the bees were making a deep earth abiding hum. This dream was joyful.

October 25, 2010

Last night as I slept I kept dreaming that I figured out the trick to staying asleep and I did stay asleep the entire night using the trick which I couldn’t remember when I woke.

October 13, 2010

Last night I dreamed there was a period like this . exactly that size floating around in my left eye. I wanted to rub my eyelid but I knew if I did so more punctuation would show up and eventually start spewing out tons of it like flies on a rotten potato.

September 26, 2010

Last night I dreamed I was at the Poet House (always the same house with poets a beautiful huge house in forest with giant windows looking out) again only this time I was there with Peter Pereira. I was attempting with his help to put toothpicks in an avocado seed so I could plant it in water something my son did in elementary school. The toothpicks kept breaking and finally I found some Pick-Up-Sticks the kind I had when I was a child and they seemed to be working but the seed slipped out of my hands and fell into the glass of water and suddenly exploded into bright colorful flowers (the colors of the Pick-Up-Sticks) strung together like a Hawaiian lei. Peter and I were stunned by its beauty.

I was living with a man who was a serial killer but he had the most amazing dishwasher a silver robotic appliance that not only cleaned greasy pots and pans but cleared plates off the table and so I stayed. At some point I was rescued by another man who gave me a goat child named Baby.

Last night I dreamed a man so old he was smooth like an infant. He was on a gurney in a turn of the century hospital. I was his nurse. He was waiting to die. He was waiting for his turn to die. There was another old man plugged to a machine all manner of tubes and hoses entering and exiting him and my patient was waiting for the other old man to be finished. He was calm and smiling. I kept pulling up my long white dress because tattoos were appearing on my legs. Lines of poetry were appearing on my thighs then a staff with notes wound its way around my calves. I was very excited to find the poetry and music. I could feel the tattoos slightly raised like newly born tattoos are.

I dreamed a buzzing sound loud who was mowing their lawn at 2 AM what fiend was sawing a hole into the earth and in my dream I looked out the window and my darling hemlock the tree that hides me from the world was completely and forever sheared was a foot tall stump and I was naked exposed my sheet on the floor my bedroom oven hot. I got up and wandered around my house drank some water went back to bed then dreamed a terrible dream of a woman killing her baby in a drive-through car wash. A toddler stood nearby screaming. The baby was in a car seat where the big slaps of heavy cloth come through soap everywhere the mother stabbing at the baby with a metal rod.

                          Escher
 
I had a long and complicated dream about you a dream in which I met your new wife named Polly and your new child named Elizabeth. Your mother was there too. I was in your house collecting my belongings having once again been banished from your life. I was confused and needed a ride home. Your wife asked you if you and I had ever danced and you denied it and this upset me (a Judas kiss three times denied) then the three of us were in bed you were behind me holding me your wife behind you and you were crying. Then I was in the bathroom trying to find my book and some lipstick and your wife came in and I told her there are many rooms in this house that you can find if you want and she thanked me. I went to hug your mother who was sobbing uncontrollably. The weight of her body was so real in this dream and her long red braid which I stroked felt like silk. I walked outside and there was a tiny girl maybe a year old or less standing in the back of a truck. I said Elizabeth! and she clapped her hands then flung her arms out like a starfish and I picked her up and she clung to me and wouldn't let go. I knew I had never met her but she knew me and loved me. (I keep dreaming this girl the child me). Then it was time for all of us to get in the car and I was I am bereft and I woke up bereft too tumbled to try to go back to sleep too tumbled to even read. I’m sorry I dreamed you. I had no right.

I had a nightmare last night the first in a very long time. I was living in a Victorian house a house I’ve dreamed of on and off for the past few years. The windows were very high. I woke in my dreamstate to a storm and my cat who has been dead for 24 years was lying outside on the windowsill with a terrible growling mean face and streaks of rust in her fur. She was the size of a beaver huge snarling and very dead. I cried out to either my son or my ex-husband both of whom were there. My son comforted me and my ex-husband went outside to grab the cat and snap her neck.

                               













Marc Chagall











Saturday I dreamed all night. First I was in a beautiful hotel room but the bed was lumpy so I pulled up the fitted sheet and the mattress was covered with marijuana buds which I scooped up. Then I was home and I discovered the remote control for my little telly gave us cable then I was back in the hotel room bed on my stomach and a woman straddled my back and was giving me a deep tissue massage. Next I was at a party in a room with all white walls and a man was making marinara then he started flinging it on the walls with a spoon and the marinara spread out into complicated gorgeous art that kept moving around morphing and rolling up and across the ceiling. Then it was announced that everyone at the party was going swimming except I didn’t have a swimsuit and said so and someone yanked my jeans off and handed me white stockings and a long white petticoat and a white satin bustier with bones the kind you wear under a ball gown. I got dressed walked to the pool but no one was there and the pool was filled with mechanical parts, engines, clocks, axles, flat pieces of metal, titanium bowls, the entire pool with all this stuff clanking around in it so I found a snow shovel and scooped the stuff out of the pool which made me very tired but gave me room to swim. I was swimming and struggling with the petticoat when the host of the party came out and jumped in the pool and yelled at me for removing the mechanical stuff. She opened a long drawer inside the pool in the deep end and started pulling out more mechanical parts and (suddenly as it happens in dreams) I was at work still in the petticoat and bustier and I was by an executive’s office and I heard someone whisper slut then I was deep in the woods watching at first a red fox then a wolf. I woke to hard rain.

Last night I had two vivid dreams. The first dream involved me going to teach a student and I drove down a long hill and my brakes went out and I drove into the student's living room. His father yelled at me. Later during the lesson I had to ask the father to turn the television down because it was disrupting us. That was my alarm clock. I hit the snooze button and the next dream was me with a bolt of pink flannel in a cowgirl design. I was wrapping records vinyl records at my job. The flannel was the wrapping paper. I was intent on making them beautiful when a man came along and decided to help. He couldn't get the flannel on neatly so he covered his record in pink bubble wrap. Then he wrote a rather long note and taped it to the mess and told me the note was a love letter to a woman. I took the record from him neatly wrapped it in pink cowgirl flannel scrunched up the letter and threw it on the floor.

I may have been dreaming AWP dreams last night as I had two distinct dreams with two distinct poets. The first dream was fairytale dark and lovely. Ana Carrete and I had big push brooms and we were sweeping the longest dock ever. The dock stretched out over the ocean. It was night and warm maybe summer and we were whispering and laughing as we swept. The next dream was with Laura Gamache who actually is at AWP. There were many women at Laura's house women inside women outside standing around talking the way friendly nice intelligent socially adept people do at parties and there some talk of having to join I had to join a club or a sorority to be part of the party and Laura had a scroll out a long scroll that I had to sign and I wanted to sign it I wanted to be part of it all but the pen kept slipping out of my hand or it would skitter off the page when I tried to write my name and Laura kept telling me very patiently to take it slow and I'd be okay but I knew I'd never be okay that I'd never be part of the party. This dream is not nearly as myterious as sweeping an immense dock in the ocean because it's pretty much how it goes for me. Every day. They were both good dreams and I blame the dreaming of poets on my brilliant editor Reb Livingston who started it.

Last night I dreamed Bach not the man but his music in my head which happens whenever I am practicing something and has always happened ever since I was a child -- dream learning.

Last night I dreamed of a huge room full of very young Asian girls, 3 or 4 years old, hundreds of them, all in blue dresses, and they were all playing violins and these jellyfish beings floated out of the their violins and flowed toward me and the air was blue. The music was beautiful and I think the jellyfish were trying to tell me something about music but I couldn't understand because my hair had grown long, to my feet, and was wrapping itself around my neck like we were all underwater. This is the second dream I've had where god-like creatures came out of musical instruments and tried to speak to me. It is common for me to dream the color blue in this, the mud season.