I was in the lobby of a classroom building on a college campus.  The room was dim, as the windowed wall stood in the shadow of the treeline.  It was dark enough to obscure the print on the various flyers taped to the walls.  Animals started streaming in from outside, black bear, horse, polar bear, cow, so many large bodies that I felt a wave of claustrophobia.  I pushed my way past them, briefly getting stuck between the two sets of doors with the polar bear (she was too confused to find her way in).  Finding safety outside, I saw my girlfriend crossing the lawn towards me.  Her Newfoundland, Giovanna, was still inside.  I went back, squeezed past the polar bear and returned to the lobby.  I was shocked to find the black bear in flagrante dilecto, having mistaken Gigi for a bear.  The poor dog already has a bad uterus, so I pushed him off to protect her weak reproductive organs.  Luckily he hadn't fully begun, but when I pushed him off I saw evidence of his preparedness.  I herded the horse, cow, and Giovanna out of the building, past the polar bear still stuck in the doors.  The livestock fled across the lawn, and my girlfriend and I crossed the campus to the cafe and ordered blueberry buckwheat pancakes from a booth in the back.  The room consisted of a perimeter of booths around a horseshoe bar, with an open kitchen in the center.  This building, too, relied on natural light.  Its windows were set in the same direction as the first building, but it overlooked the meadow and took in enough light for a pleasant breakfast.

"Dreaming Something Else" by Lyn Hejinian, in Bob Perelman feature, Jacket 39.

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.

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.

There was a box that I was supposed to handle, but I knew something was amiss. I also had a strong feeling that I'd "be next" which was sort of terrifying. I asked a man to open the box because I had my suspicions. I was correct! The alien inside the box was not dead. Not only was he still alive, but his flesh had been eaten off by bugs and critters--he was writhing terribly. It was not too late to save him. He had been put in that box by another alien, but since we just exposed the activities of this 2nd evil alien, he would be dealt with and I no longer had to worry about being put in a similar flesh eating box. BUT, when the man opened the box he released all the flesh eating bugs and critters (in my bedroom!), one was a large, black scorpion. I knew I was going to have to get some bug spray to take care of this problem. Then I gave a poetry reading, then I tried to find matching knee high stockings and then I came back to the house and found Chris asleep in the bathtub. I woke and told him about the bugs, he already knew, they were in the living room. I told him about the scorpion, although at first I said "scarab," we both corrected my mistake at the same time. It was not a scarab, it was a scorpion and yes, Chris was aware of that too.

I went into a gallery. There was an installation that consisted of very realistic, life-sized sculptures of people who were half melted into the floor. Large puddles surrounded each half melted person. They were sticking up at odd angles.

I was peddling a one-speed bicycle seventy miles an hour on a freeway with my wife and grandson aboard. We had one piece of luggage strapped to the frame: a leather saddlebag. Confused by the signs, I took the wrong exit and went up a hill. We got off in a flat graveled area surrounded by leafy trees. There were no cars or bicycles in sight. Several people were milling around, not at all impressed by how we’d arrived. Up ahead, on higher ground, there was a large round concrete tank. Hovering just above it was an empty wooden rocking chair, turning slowly in the breeze.

This weekend I had two dreams of beautiful, tranquil places. In one I had just arrived (Brussels) and in another the pilot of my plane flew low to show the passengers a new place with large, newly-blooming flowers and a pristine beach.

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.

I dreamed I had come off the train in a small town somewhere in America, Mexico perhaps, judging by the clothes the people wore – big hats, lots of religious iconography in the streets, sacred hearts and blessed virgins everywhere.  It must have been a weekend at least or perhaps a holiday.  People congregated in bars at outside tables and on the street itself.  
I said good-bye to my husband who had travelled with me on the train.  He had errands to run and we planned to meet up after an hour or two.  I intended to wander and explore alone.  

I left the station and walked down to a small shopping area in the centre of town.  I thought at first that I had lost my shoes.  At one point I looked downward and realised I was barefoot.  I must have left my shoes behind.  I could not understand that I had taken off my shoes and left them behind but the evidence of my bare feet was incontrovertible.  How else could I lose my shoes.

I walked around in circles looking for them.  There were many different abandoned shoes scattered across the streets, in pairs and singles.  Most resembled the recycled variety of sandal shoe we had bought for my daughter for Christmas from American Apparel – the shoes that had twice fallen apart and that I had needed to return twice before we finally collected a pair that have lasted for more than one wear.  

No sooner had I found my shoes than I discovered I had left my handbag somewhere and it was gone too, stolen I feared, and worst of all, worse than the money stolen would be the dreadful job of having to cancel and then re-order my credit card and licence and other bank cards.  

I walked alongside a young couple with American accents.  She told me she was about to go off to pray.  He, on the other hand, was not interested in prayer.  He had jobs to do.  The woman scolded me for my carelessness when I told her about my lost handbag.  They were gone before they had even offered to help me to look for it.  To them I seemed a lost cause, a hopeless case.  I could see it in their eyes.  
Next thing, I saw my handbag hanging off my arm.  It must have been there all along.  I had simply not recognised I was carrying it, in much the way I sometimes forget that my glasses, the ones I think I have lost, are sitting there on top of my head.  

My handbag however had changed shape.  It was larger than it used to be and when I looked inside I saw that the original handbag, my real handbag, was fitted snugly inside.  I could not bring myself to take a look to check that my wallet had not been stolen.  I still suspected foul play and I needed a quiet space alone to contemplate my losses.

I dreamed I watered my cactus. I dreamed a long scrolled piece of paper upon which my sins and good deeds were being accounted for were being shaded in by a lead pencil. The sins were shaded over and over until they were a black ribbon and the good deeds were erasing the black.

I was strapped to a chair, wearing a sort of Lone Ranger mask with wires attached to the throats of people sitting around me. One by one these people were injected with a truth serum that compelled them to express their deepest fears. Their lips moved, but their words came out of my mouth, and I felt their fears as if they were my own.

And then I found myself in France, walking down an esplanade with a pretty, self-contained Dutch girl, a taciturn Spaniard, and a pudgy, swarthy, curly-haired young man who spoke both French and English fluently. This last handed me a pair of underwear like blue terrycloth Speedos. "Ceci sont de rigueurs pour les hommes en France," he said. Apparently my companions were expecting me to drop my pants and don these outré Gallic briefs right in front of them. I tried to explain that I don't wear underwear--that, comme beaucoup des types Américains, I schlepp around in jeans much of the time, allowing my junk to flounce untrammeled inside them--but the French equivalents of some of these words escaped me, so I appealed to the pudgy one for help. He'd been my go-to guy whenever my French had failed me. On this occasion, however, he refused to oblige. He just regarded me with cool amusement as I mumbled, "Mon membre... les bijoux de ma famille..."

The End of Our World

We had heard the warnings: a nuclear explosion and death imminent. We needed to get to a safe space. People congregated in the school hall at the end of a corridor. I hoped my children were among them. I could not be certain. I was busy chasing up a couple of other children, two boys, one of whom insisted on climbing up a tower to have a look out and to help fix a technological fault. I called up to him to hurry.

People were racing along corridors to get to the safe place. We had only minutes to spare. A person on a loudspeaker counted down the seconds. All this in slow motion and I had still not reached the safe place.

Somehow the explosion went off and I found myself behind the closed doors of the school hall while I noticed my sister come racing down still outside. Could we let her in or would we be required to keep the doors sealed from then on through fear of radioactivity?

We opened the doors. I went looking for my children in this crowded building, out the back way towards the toilets where I met my husband. He and I were alone now in a sealed off toilet block, alone while the rest of the world was dying. We knew it was only a matter of time before we too would die. We sat on the floor and leaned against the wall. We were reconciled, tranquil even. At one stage I got up again and peeked through the door into the open courtyard and grey wafts of radioactive smoke full of heat poured in. I shut the door instantly and sat down again. We knew we would be unconscious before we felt any pain, before the heat consumed us. This was a relief. My husband was already drifting off.

Did we say our goodbyes? I knew we were soon to die but still I could not believe it. I wanted to see my children at least one last time assuming they were still alive.

I had taken off my shoes. I slipped them back on with the thought I will die wearing shoes. Then I decided to get up again. I was wide-awake. I went out a different door this time and was surprised that the grey breeze was not so powerful now. There was also a wind that seemed to blow the radioactive fog away.

I ran along the corridor into another building. Clusters of people milled around talking to one another. One person had even prepared a meal. He sat at a low table knife and fork in hand. It might be a good idea to eat, I thought. Who knows soon there would be food shortages.

One couple held a baby. I thought of my grandson. Where were they, my soon to be married daughter, her partner and their son? Where were my other daughters? I did not feel distressed only a vague sense of resignation as if I had accepted our fate, whatever our fate would bring. I woke up trying to locate each of my children.

In this dream I am back in my hometown of Marlboro, NY at my grandmother’s house. Besides my grandmother and I, there are several other people at her house and we are expecting someone else to arrive momentarily. While we are waiting I decide to take a walk to the center of the village. It is winter, with a fresh snowfall on the ground. A large storm has passed through and there are about two feet of snow. None of the streets have been plowed, and no one else is out and about. As I approach the small grocery store on Western Avenue I notice that my dog is not with me and grow concerned. I turn around and head back toward the house, all the while calling for the dog, not knowing where she is. As I pass one house a man comes out on his porch and invites me in. There is a wood stove in his living room and near it a stack of firewood in a rack that he has built. At this moment a knock comes on the door, and the homeowner lets in another man, a fire inspector who says that the wood rack is not up to code. Apparently there is additional work that needs to be done in the bathroom, but what the connection is to the wood rack is puzzling. I laugh and tell the owner that he should have installed an outhouse. Next, I leave and continue walking toward my grandmother’s house. A snowplow has come through, making walking on the streets much easier. I’m still concerned about my missing dog, but when I arrive back at grandma’s I see she (the dog) is on the enclosed porch playing with another dog. At my approach she excitedly pees near the door and I tell my grandmother that I will wash it out the door with a teapot of hot water. As I go to fetch it, grandma tells me to get another pot of cool water to fill the birdbath in the front yard. As I am washing the porch I glance inside the house and see several people seated in the living room. There are also several dogs, and I count them. There are eight, of various breeds and sizes. Among them are a Scotch Terrier, an Irish Setter and a large brown dog of unknown breed. Thyere are also two cats in the room. I go inside and begin a conversation with a young woman - my cousin’s girlfriend. She asks me who is going to be performing at a local music venue. I tell her that rather than asking that question she should decide who she wanted to see in concert and contact that band’s management office in Woodstock to find out where they would be playing. At this point I awaken and the dream is over.

My father had everyone’s pay in a flat leather case, but he had decided that he was going to give the case to a courier for delivery. I tried to convince him that the courier would steal the money. Although there was doubt in his expression, he insisted that wouldn’t happen. Still hoping to persuade him, I followed him through the back entrance into a gloomy institutional kitchen. No one was around. We passed through a set of swinging doors with round windows in them. Suddenly there was about twenty feet of space between us. He met and whispered briefly with a very tall man in a suit. Then I followed him back outside. We were standing in the shade of huge buildings held up by granite columns. I tried again to tell him that the money would be stolen and that he would be held responsible. But he seemed powerless, as if the decision were now out of his hands. About that time, we were joined by the courier. She was about thirty-five, and clearly someone that shouldn’t be trusted. My father handed her the case. Once again, a large space opened between us, and I tried to guess which route she would take away from the buildings. There were several narrow passageways that led directly to the road, but she surprised me by taking the long way around. In no time at all, she had run on ahead of me, and was rounding the base of a mountain. I started to run after her, knowing full well that when I try to run in dreams I often have trouble gaining traction, or I run on my hands... so I stopped running and stood up to take a deep breath, trying to remember how to run properly — and then I was off again... until I was distracted by some cucumber plants alongside the road... the cucumbers were ripe, and if no one picked them they would be wasted... my father loved cucumbers... and then I remembered he was no longer alive. I felt one. It was soft. On closer examination, I found something wrong with all of them. I looked up in time to see the woman disappear as she followed the bend in the road.

I went to some foreign country with a group of friends. Maybe it was Hungary or Czech Republic, not sure. Maybe Russia? We had to take a train from some place to some other place. Along the way I was concerned about the quality or the status of my passport. I also grew concerned that I seemed to be the only person trying to keep track of what time it was, what time we had to be anywhere, or get back. At some point Cara Benson was there, and I think we were visiting Athena Stylos in a house she either owned or was borrowing. I think she owned it because at some point I was climbing up this very, very long, spiraling, meandering hand-made staircase, that I’m pretty sure she put together. It felt extremely rickety but everyone assured me it was strong nonetheless. The staircase was something I felt a need to replicate somehow, either drawing, or filming. It was like a Jan Svankmajer creation. Cobbled together, very comical, but also strangely beautiful (in its uniqueness and that it was made at all). It didn’t ascend at a consistent pitch, but dipped up and down in places. The pitch was mostly shallow, too, so that crawling/climbing along on it was not so much going up or down anywhere as all around a room. But also up. Then we were getting ready to go to bed (I think) and I think maybe I felt funny about not knowing where to sleep. Maybe Mackenzie Carrignan was there too? I think so. I think it was all poets from Dusie, a couple of dude poets as well. The whole of it was darkly lit, and everything felt old and worn. The next day we were getting back on our way, maybe to go home. We stopped in a café for a quick breakfast. Several people had already sat down around a wooden bar and were drinking some kind of café au lait or lattes or cappuccino. These were in small-ish clear glass cups and mugs, very brown…the foamed milk on top was also brown It looked all sweet and sticky. Foamy brown sugar. I sat down next to someone, worried (again) I was taking someone’s spot but sort of not caring because I felt an urgency to move on and to get us going so we wouldn’t be late for our train. Someone came out of the bathroom to re-join us, and then I woke up.

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.

This morning I dreamed that I watched a policeman in an unmarked car pull over a woman driver directly in front of my house. The woman stood at the window of the police car and talked down to the policeman through his open window, the reverse of what normally happens when a person who has been stopped sits in their car and waits for the police to come to their car window to address them.

‘You provoked me with your driving,’ the woman said’. The policeman listened and then they were both outside of their cars face to face on the nature strip. The policeman started to write out a ticket. I could not hear their conversation now but I watched as the woman, aged somewhere in her mid thirties grew visibly upset.

Whatever she had been accused of doing seemed to come as a surprise to her and although I could see that the policeman’s manner had softened in his approach to her, he continued to write out a ticket. He went back to his car and I went over to the woman who was now sobbing to the point of breakdown.

‘He says I was going at 33 kilometres an hour, three kilometres over the limit. If ever there was such nitpicking.’ She wiped her eyes with her hand. What’s more, they say I have a blood alcohol reading. How can I?’

The policeman returned with a tester and the woman blew into its nozzle.

‘I haven’t had a drink since last night,’ she said, and I hoped for her that she did not drink so much the night before that it might still register in her blood. Clearly it did not because the policeman told her she could go after he handed her a parking ticket.

Next I was in a police car with three male policeman, rollicking chaps who enjoyed one another’s company. Somehow I had lost my handbag and they were taking me to the police station to sort it out. I had gone earlier to a shop and put my handbag and my daughter’s handbag down on the floor. I stood and watched a couple go through a dance routine. The girl was young, maybe only eighteen or so and dressed like a hillbilly, the man was almost double her size and perhaps three times her age.

They came together in a sort of country style dance, back and forth. It was not clear who was teaching whom to dance. I turned away to look for something to buy and when I looked back my handbag had been completely emptied of its contents along with that of my daughter.

The man owned up to it at the young woman’s prompting and he gave me back my belongings. Some how it seemed he would only rob those he did not know and for some reason he considered me to be an acquaintance.

Was I going to the police station to report him? I do not know. My memory of the dream peters off here.

Last night I dreamed a parade of flying cars. My son's 57 Chevy was in the middle of the front row of cars. I thought it's about time and ran outside to see if my little Civic would fly and sure enough I turned the ignition and my car floated up above my roof.

Last night I dreamed I was watching soldiers in the desert who were surrounded by a large thick Plexiglas cage. I was on the outside of the cage banging on it with both my hands and shouting. They could neither hear nor see me. I finally gave up and sat down in the sand. I was naked and I knew I was dreaming as I was dreaming.

I was determined to dream & I did, in the hope that the time spent dreaming would free me but fearful that the trap might spring & would drag me still further down. There remained the bed to hold us up, to sustain us for the troubled days ahead. “You” was the name of someone but she used another name. I was exposed to it as well, angry enough to cut the dream short but willing to pursue it where it led. A friend attempted to be rational, yet the attempt itself was the cause of his depression & what made it so hard to bear. Here was a phenomenon no doubt but more than that a constant urge. Apart from being gracious the opportunity arose to tip our hand – much less our hats. A thousand thousand pardons. Is your brother in that group of young men leaning against a wall as nonchalant as in a photograph from years ago but unapproachable? A trip to somewhere – Italy, Mexico, I can’t remember—but did that make the wonder less extreme?

We were watching a movie in which three young men were featured – a young Jew & two others. A discussion followed after a failed phone call to Isaac Bashevis Singer, to see if we could meet him at his new apartment on the Lower East Side. I tried to point out to the others that the film’s director cast a blond-haired actor as his medieval Jew (Jews are not supposed to be blond), but the others wouldn’t let me finish my sentence. Feeling on edge I walked outside & smoked a cigarette.

I was on a train soon after, heading for Bremerhaven I thought, but I couldn’t remember at which station I should exit. I checked the directions I had written down, and they said Convent Avenue. But I seemed to have been traveling too long. I must have passed it, I thought, and I got off at the next station, which was clearly not what I wanted. I checked a large map on the wall opposite the track but Convent Avenue wasn’t on it. Was it still ahead or had I already passed it? I knew I had to ask someone, but the platform had already emptied out.

The streets around our old apartment house were covered with a dark green moss – something uncanny, that if I touched it, would burn or paralyze my fingers. I knew that the river was only a few blocks away & that if I reached it, there would be a chance of cleansing. But the child at my side – not Matthew but a dark-faced girl I didn’t recognize – kept pulling in the opposite direction. I felt that this was wrong, but I could do nothing else but follow.

I was watching a movie on or by Yosano Akiko, when people started rushing out & others rushing in, & I remembered that I’d forgotten the paper I was going to deliver at the poetry conference of which this was a part, along with an expert in Italian literature, a little swarthy man who was only now arriving.

Startled by the noise the old woman looked up & saw: the television screen was black & the basket on top of it was empty. She said: I know who did it, that young girl did it. Then she began to scream, or I did as a warning, & the women servants came running, & the household pets came running. And one of us kept screaming till I woke up.

In Germany again, with Ammiel or someone who looks like Ammiel, going to hear & meet an Arab poet. We are traveling by trolley to check out the performance space, and once we find it, we go to a street café around the corner to get a bite to eat. After we’ve ordered I realize suddenly that I not only don’t have money for the meal but nothing for the reading & the reader. I decide to go back home and leave, making my way back to a main street, where I ask directions in German and someone points me to a wide boulevard, where a trolley or a bus should be running. But when I get there I find that the road is under construction and have to make my way down a steep ploughed-up ditch in order to cross it. Trying to find the bus, trying to remember the number of the building for the reading, to which I must return. It’s number 403! – I’m almost sure of it – but I decide to wake up instead and to end the dilemma.

A group of young men leaning against a wall as if in a photograph but unapproachable, & I realize that I met them years ago on a forgotten trip to somewhere – Italy, Mexico, I can’t remember.

[These poems by Jerome Rothenberg were recovered, along with numerous others, for Retrievals, a volume of Uncollected & New Poems 1955-2005, to be published later this year by Mark Weiss & Junction Press. Thirteen previous installments have appeared since 2008 on his blog Poems and Poetics.]

I had one of those dreams last night where I find myself taking care of a huge number of birds.

I had one of those dreams last night where I find myself taking care of a huge number of birds.

The dream often goes like this: I discover that, unknown to me, there is another bird in the cage with Lester, and that all this time I have been feeding and taking care of only Lester, and not this other bird, who is almost dead. In the dream, I always nurse the neglected bird back to health, but there are always close calls. Sometimes the extra bird, or birds, are not in Lester's cage, but in some other part of the house--frequently under the bed. Once, I was on a pirate ship pitching and heaving in the middle of the storm, and I had to prevent several parrots from drowning and going overboard. In another version, I'm swimming through rough seas while two parakeets sit on my head, singing.

In last nights dream, I heard parrots outside, so I went out to see them. There were two hyacinth macaws sitting in the tree about the apartment building dumpster. They looked quite ragged, but I eventually coaxed them down and took them into our apartment. I found an extra, hyacinth-macaw sized jungle gym and put it in one corner of the room. The macaws began to play on the gym and settle in quite happily. Lester didn't mind them, either. After the macaws were relaxed and preening, Mark came in with two rainbow conures. I found a large cage for them and some extra toys, etc, and soon they were settling in, too. Some version of this kept happening--either I'd go outside and see two parrots and bring them in, or Mark would. At a certain point, our entire apartment was filled with parrots--two to three in each cage (Lester was the only one not sharing his space).

The last bird that Mark brought in was a huge pelican--but in the dream it looked more like a cross between a pelican and a stork, since the bird was very tall. The pelican's beak was cracked, and there were stitches all around her neck. We nursed the pelican/stork back to health, and eventually removed the stitches.

I was seated near one end of a very long dining table. A few strangers were present. The table was covered by a cheap white cloth that looked like a giant napkin. The main meal had been eaten. In the distance, the salt and pepper shakers looked like windmills or towers, and seemed to be part of a large, rugged landscape. My mother was standing beside me, fretting about what had happened to her butterscotch pudding. As usual, she had poured it into the funny little champagne glasses we had when I was growing up. But the pudding was grainy, pale, and thin. When I asked her if she’d remembered the brown sugar, she was too heartbroken to speak. Then someone said, “Corn starch?” I looked around. That someone was me.

My dream had me pushing carts around a hotel basement somewhere and there was a vague menace.

Last night I dreamed I was sewing up babies' heads with thick silk skeins of embroidery thread, garnet red, sky blue, and grass green. The skeins were wound in the usual lazy 8 shape but the thread was difficult, slippery, and I thought the thread was actually skeins of human veins in spite of their marvelous colors and textures. The babies were lined up in a long crib in a Victorian hospital. They weren't crying, but they were quiet. I guess passive would be a good word. Perhaps they had been drugged. The embroidery thread slithered in and out of my needle, refusing to stay put so I was constantly stopping to re-thread, and this was the only thing that caused me concern.

I worked with someone called Michael, who traveled in disguise for much of the time. He was a superman type who righted wrongs. There was also a female character in my dream who was evil. She morphed into different disguises to fool me and others into thinking we were safe. Then she assumed her original shape. She could create multiple characters at once.

I had been out to dinner with a daughter/sister who sat with her new extended family. She fed her baby from a bottle. I was intrigued to watch a bottle fed baby. The idea that you could actually see the milk disappearing, you could see the milk go into the baby reassured his mother I imagined unlike my experience when you could only trust that the breast fed baby was getting enough to drink simply by the amount of sucking she did and by the feel of your breasts between feeds, before and after.

I held the baby for a while and for some reason took him with me back to my room in a nearby castle. I had the baby wrapped loosely in it blanket and I worried that he would not feel safe with me once he recognised his mother was not there.

Michael my superman colleague arrived and told me that he was worried we were in danger. We would need to travel above the local area and look into the backs of other houses and castles to see what was going on.

‘I have to take the baby home first,’ I said.

‘Leave him here,’ Michael said, but no, I insisted, I must return him to his mother I could not leave him alone.

‘Wait for me, Michael,’ I said. ‘Wait for me.’

I worried Michael would not wait. I raced back to the family gathering and handed the baby back to his mother. She seemed disgruntled, not so much because I had taken her baby for a walk but because somehow earlier I had led her to believe that her extended family were not all they were cracked up to.

One member of her family was Malcolm Frazer, ex prime minister of Australia. At one stage he announced to the table that he was getting old. He spelt out his age – seventy-three years. In the dream he seemed much older than that.

I went back to Michael who was sorting out a car in which to make our trip. I needed to collect a final something from my room. On the way downstairs I recognised a woman on the stairs ahead of me as one of the evil woman’s stooges. I would not be fooled. I grabbed hold of her before she had a chance to attack me and squeezed her so tight her disguise fell away. I threw her onto the floor. Several other stooges appeared, all dressed as respectable staff or guests of the castle in which I was staying. I could not battle them all. I fled back to the car park to escape with Michael. The evil woman was in hot pursuit.

‘Michael,’ I called, ‘Michael.’ But when I looked to where his car – an old VW – had been, it was not there. No sign of Michael either and I knew then he had assumed a disguise. He could have been in any one of the cars that now occupied the car park. There were cars in all shapes and sizes rather like my grandson’s matchbox collection, sporty races, ambulance cars and caravans. There were conventional cars and old-fashioned re-furbished types.

Where was he? I knew – I hoped – he would rescue me. Somehow the evil woman also knew that Michael was somewhere in the car park. She did not lunge for me, therefore, perhaps hoping he would materialize. I woke up.

Last night I dreamed I brought my violin to work and went to the river and played Mozart's Turkish violin concerto. People were running on the path and no one stopped to listen they didn't acknowledge me but the fish in the river came together in a large arrow with the tip of the arrow pointing at me and watched.

I dreamed I was pushing a Victorian pram and I was stopped on a cobblestone street by a police officer who looked in the pram and demanded to know where my baby was so I took off my sweater (pink cashmere with pearl buttons) and bundled it up and placed it in the pram and said There.

I'm at a table with other people, including Rauan. We have to decide whether or not we're going to enter into some kind of challenge. It's four parts with deadly consequences. For the first challenge we need to select a particular button on a dog's collar. If we don't agree to accept the challenge, the dog blows up. If we do, we have to press the "accept" button on the collar. Rauan is participating in the challenge, but I also suspect that he's the one behind it. The committee agrees to press the accept button. The dog lives.

The second challenge is timed. Two committee women are controlling a cursor on a screen. Our task is to decide between two buttons. One button is to continue the challenge, the other is to quit. If we quit, a well-known poet blogger will be blown up. The decision is made last minute although each woman selected a different button. I'm not sure if that's an accident or intentional--meaning I wasn't sure if they had different opinions or just weren't working well together. We decide to save the poet blogger although it seems likes the button was clicked a second after the deadline. Now I'm wondering if perhaps the dog and poet blogger might not have really exploded. Maybe Rauan is just using the threat of explosion as an incentive for us to take this all seriously.

Before we begin the third challenge a bunch of plain-clothed agents come in. I tell Rauan that they've set their sights on him. They take him into another room for questioning.

* * *

The next day I dreamed:

Rauan is driving a convertible in Virginia (Leesburg). It's snowing. He gets out and lets me drive. The driver's seat is full of snow. My body doesn't fit the mold that Rauan's body made. I'm having a difficult time reaching the pedal or finding the wheel.

In my dream last night I walked along Riversdale Road and found that my neighbour’s house had been rearranged for a performance that was to be held there over the next day.

I sat in a café and eavesdropped on a conversation between a mother and her daughters. At least I assumed they were her daughters. All had dark black hair. They chattered joyously in that bickering sort of way families do.

I watched them walk out of the restaurant and then along Riversdale Road. They were connected with the performance somehow. I soon found that the husband of the woman with the dark hair and father of the three girls was the director of the play. He had a Scottish accent. I stood in the street and talked to the woman. I introduced myself. She commented on the size and wasted space of our neighbour’s house in which the play was to be performed.

‘I’d change it,’ she said. ‘I’d pull down the front.’

I did not tell the woman that my husband and I had plans to buy this house if ever it came on the market. It adjoined ours and we would love to own the whole space. The woman went on her way and as I walked back home I realised I had the wrong property in mind. The play was to be performed not at my neighbour’s smaller house but in a mansion two blocks further down the road in a place currently occupied by the Jesuits. This was a magnificent space, with a sweeping circular staircase, deep red carpets, and heavy velvet curtains. I was allowed to walk around inside and watched the actors go through their paces.

Towards the end of my dream, which had many twists and turns; I wound up standing on the edge of a high grassy hill overlooking the first full dress rehearsal. I stood with the director of the play. We held hands. His daughters joined us. They were older than my daughters.

One of my daughters had a lead role in the play. I was stunned at the beauty of her singing. I looked down to my feet and realised that the hill on which I stood was in fact a steep slope, so steep that it ran like a wall to the ground. I slid down. I could not get any traction in the grass and lost hold of the director’s hand.

‘It happens like that,’ he said. ‘As soon as you realise where you’re standing, you lose your grip.’

I arrived at the stadium with my cherished copy of Finnegans Wake. I was joined by several others in a grassy area, a kind of walkway high upon its rim. We were to give a performance of some kind. As the stadium filled with people, I put my book on a long narrow table, then fell into conversation with a grown friend from grade school. She seemed to be in charge. She asked if I would be singing. I told her I hadn’t planned to, but could if she wanted. The stadium grew louder and louder. I went back and looked out over the rim — there was now a sea of people. Everyone was dressed in white and holding a little round light, a kind of third red eye glowing against their chests. Afraid I might fall in, I stepped away from the edge and stood by some foliage. I was on a narrow graveled road. From there, I could see that my book was missing. The sun had set. The performance began. I couldn’t see him, but I immediately recognized the voice of James Joyce. He was reading a passage from his book. It was then that I realized I had completely forgotten what I was supposed to do. In my foolish confidence, I had felt so prepared that I hadn’t brought any notes. The reading ended. Joyce was followed by someone playing an electric guitar. The musician was facing the audience, but standing in a shell where he couldn’t be seen. My stomach was in an uproar. I knew I was next. But I couldn’t go on. At the last moment, I asked someone if he knew who had stolen my copy of Finnegans Wake. He smiled and shrugged. As the music ended, I set off down the road, embarrassed, disappointed, ashamed.

I dream about people I am not actually close to so that when I wake up, my first thoughts are run-over emotions and connections that are completely fabricated. I do not blame my dreams.
I own a strange purse that I would never actually touch in reality and it is empty except for my hand digging inside of it. My hand is full of rings I have stolen and their sharp designs dig lightly into my skin. I am shopping in a mall of complete glamour and I cannot stop stealing. No one can catch me and so I continue because I know I can. My friends are mad at me and they run steps ahead of me and pretend they don't know me. I look down and see that I am dressed like them and this makes me want to scream. I think I have stolen everything I am wearing.

Before, we were at a party. The alcohol was low and everyone was dressed for summer and wearing shades of blue. I felt misplaced and angry. I think it was because I knew I would not be drunk. This makes me angry in reality.

When I awoke, I was speaking out loud explaining to my friends why they should still like me and my black cat is wrapped between my legs. My teeth hurt so I take a vicodin.

DEATH

Whenever I have nightmares
It's the tonton macoutes I'm dreaming about
The other night I dreamed
They made me carry my coffin on my back
Everyone on all the Port-au-Prince streets was laughing at me
There were 2 or 3 boys not laughing
The other night I dreamed
They made me dig my grave in the cemetery
Everyone on television was laughing at me
There were 2 or 3 girls not laughing
The other night I dreamed
A macoute squad was getting ready to shoot me
Everyone was laughing
There was an old woman who wasn't laughing
Those little boys and girls there -
If I say more the devil will steal my voice
The old woman
Is Shooshoon Fandal
They brought her to see the macoutes shoot
Her 5 sons on a street in Grand Gosier.

Félix Morisseau-Leroy, "Shooshoon." Translation from Creole by Jack Hirschman and Boadiba.

Poem excerpted from 1/16/10 NYTimes Week in Review article by Madison Smartt Bell, "Haiti in Ink and Tears: A Literary Sampler."

I am teaching a class of pre school students, substituting for Iris P, the permanent teacher. I believe I was chosen because of unique, but undefined qualifications. Chatting at lunch, I discover that others of no talent have been given a similar job. Deflation and depression set in. But soon, I once more, become pleased with myself and my ability to charm a class of pre school students into focusing on reading Huckleberry Finn.

The children seem to be enjoying themselves. Iris then reappears and sends me on a field trip. I take about 30 children, accompanied by a group of parents. We spontaneously board a bus—that turns out to be an express. We try in vain to get off. Screaming and ringing the bell. We disembark miles from our destination.

We begin to walk back to school. The children wander into the street. I try to reach Iris by phone, but am unable to. “Help!” One by one, the parents leave. I am alone with the children, running from front to back of the line, attempting to move the kids on to the sidewalk. I fail, as the line snakes into traffic. Cars veer to avoid them. Finally, several kids are hit. An oncoming bus sends children flying. How will I report the incident? This is my main concern. I reflect back on myself, horrified. I wake up screaming, “KIDS!’’

..............(2 poems distilled from dream)

........................Children Walking

........................Middle of the road

........................Oncoming traffic

........................Children skipping

........................Oncoming traffic

.........................Inevitability looming

........Pride

worm emerges

seduced by the sun

toyed with

swallowed by

.................blue jay squawking

.................breast thrust

punt return specialist

reaches goal

beats chest

sambas on opponent’s back

..................fifteen yard

....................penalty assessed

My youngest and richest brother has loaned me his car. I can drive it though I find it difficult to control. It is a huge four-wheel drive monster elevated well above the rest of the cars on the road. In order to get inside I need to hoist myself in through the sunroof. Once inside, after I switch on the ignition I am aware that I drive almost by remote control. I do not know how otherwise to drive this car. I manage to take it places. I go to the shops. I stop at a market stall. I sit opposite a couple of women, one of whom I recognise from my school days.

‘Are you Anna T?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ she says amazed that I recognise her. After we chat about life at my old school she remembers my name. I talk to another woman on my other side at the table who is dressed in the pale blue uniform of her daughter’s school. This school is different from my old school. This school uniform belongs to the student who attends the prestigious Saint Catherine’s girls school in South Yarra. The woman who must be in her fifties looks odd in her daughter’s uniform.

‘I’m planning to raffle it at auction as a fund raiser,’ she says.

The market hall is filled with shoppers many of whom this woman seems to know. Someone suggests she takes offers for the dress here and now before the auction begins.

‘Any bids?’ the woman calls out and another calls back, ‘Thirty five dollars’.

I wonder will they extend the bidding here and is it fair? I could raise it a dollar but the thought comes to me as I find myself walking up the school path of my old school that I do not need any more clutter in my life. What would I do with such a thing? I would probably fold it away in some dark cupboard somewhere and look at it only when I move house or spring clean.

I make a telephone call to my younger sister. I want to know whether it is okay for me to talk to her on Christmas day. For some reason I need to line up the call otherwise it will not happen. I plead with her to let me ring but my sister is silent on the other end of the line. I can hear her breathing but she will not agree or disagree. I am frantic at the silence.

I find myself back in my brother’s car trying to get home. I meet a woman who warns me that she too once owned such a car and in the event of a crash it was positively dangerous. There was no way of controlling it.

I take a tram to get to a meeting in the middle of the city. I have trouble finding the right tram. Eventually I am at the meeting and the offer goes out for someone to participate on a project related to my thesis topic. Somehow it has a Halloween quality as if the project will involve ghosts. I tell the group that I would like to be part of such an experiment but I do not say it forcefully enough. Another woman beside me, an older woman says that she will be the experimental subject and the group organiser chooses her. It does not do to be timid I think, as I watch the woman retreat out through the back of the room. She is off on an adventure but were I to participate in such an adventure I realise it might be overwhelming. It might drive me mad. Still I feel jealous of the woman who has the guts to speak out loudly and as a consequence gets her way.

I wake up.

In my dream I am at a writer’s convention, a workshop of sorts, akin to the one held in the Blue Mountains of Katoomba, but the location is different. This workshop is held near the beach. The houses in which the workshop participants are located sit atop two rocky outcrops that overlook the sea. It is necessary between sessions to walk from one house to the other and sessions are short. Generally they run for about fifteen minutes each.

I can keep up the pace through the first few days but coming towards the end of the workshop I begin to feel tired. Tired and disappointed. I have not connected well with any of my fellow participants. Although I have made an effort to be friendly and to chat, no one else is forthcoming. Every conversation is brief and superficial.

There is a hierarchy of superiority at this workshop as well. The more advanced writers are given the opportunity to stay on an extra day free of charge but they will need to run a group for novice writers in return.

I would like to be in this position but I have not been chosen and even if I were I could not. I have made arrangements to return home after a week and I cannot extend my stay. I feel unhappy and dissatisfied in a familiar way. I long to feel part of this group but I cannot. Even the woman with whom I travelled to the workshop, a woman whom I have known for a long time, disappoints me. She is tight and ungenerous. She is even reluctant to join the final dinner on the last evening.

I overhear a man on his mobile phone making arrangements for this dinner, which I would like to join and somehow he hands me the phone and I have a brief conversation with my husband about my plans for my return. When I finish the conversation I offer first to let the man use my mobile phone to make up for the time spent on his.

‘Alternatively,’ I say, ‘I can pay the cost of the call. How much do you reckon it’s worth?’

The man is lying on a couch beside his girlfriend.

‘About $150.00,’ she says, without even looking at him.

‘That’s an expensive phone call, ‘ I say. ‘Are you sure?’

‘It could even be as high as two hundred,’ she says.

I retract my offer to pay money. ‘You can use my phone instead.’ I feel ripped off; cheated by this couple and suddenly I am exhausted. I struggle back to the other house and decide to opt out of the next group meeting.

I need to climb three steps to get to my room but am hindered by a man asleep on the top step. He grabs hold of my leg as I climb over the top of him. It seems a friendly gesture and I welcome the contact. Then one of the organisers, a man with a clipboard, comes along and tells me I must return for the next session. I tell him I have plans to skip it but he insists.

The other man still asleep on the top step ignores the organiser and I would like to do likewise but I cannot. I grab my notebook and make my way back to the group. Before I get there I and wake up.

I’m alone on my back in a field. A low-flying, slow-moving goose stops directly above me. I close my eyes. When I open them, I see the blind-hungry face of an owl. I show him my hands to prove I’m not dead. His blink is a nod. He moves on.

In my dream my sister and I are on holidays from boarding school. My sister is a cross between my daughter and my sister, the two flip about in my dream but I notice this only now as I write the dream down. In my dream their identity is stable.

We travel on an escalator in a fabric shop in search of material for a new doona or bedspread. Either we will buy the necessary material or we will buy the finished product, whichever we find that best resembles the colour my sister is after. She has a sample. It is a sea green colour more turquoise but one that is predominantly green not blue.

I have traveled here in this shop alone and I have some sense that I know my way about but everything seems to have changed and when we ask directions to the manufacturer’s counter from a fellow shopper within this huge department store, she tells us that it no longer exists.

We are standing at the foot of a straight ladder like staircase. I consider the possibility of going up but another shopper gets in before me and I give way to her. She must be in her mid fifties this woman and surprises me at her determination to climb this ladder even as in one hand she carries a heavy bag.

She manages to climb about ten stairs and I am close behind. Somehow I decide this trip is not worth it and I urge my sister/my daughter below to stay put. Then we walk down to the basement, where we come across a dark room called the bored room. We go inside and see a group of fellow students and one mother at a cafeteria style bar where they help themselves to coffee and ice cream.

No, I say to my daughter/sister we will not stop here. We do not need to stop here. We are not bored.

So I’m discussing changes to the description of a class, simplifying it, not demanding so much of the students. The registrar agrees and is saving me a space for the new description and title. There must be some field or something that I have to get across. There always is. Then there’s the question of who needs to be on the beach—I or my mother. That’s part of it—the mother has to sit on the beach and wait. It gives her an excuse to be there. I think it’s me, waiting for my daughter.

Then I am trying to restore the back of a building. It seems to need painting. Is what I have painted good or not? Who is in charge? There are words on the walls, but the question is not what they say, but how do they look. Inside the rooms are full of things I don’t care about, and I’m trying to get the kids to understand that can’t let just anyone in, into the bathroom. Everywhere I turn there are flounces and trim, things I don’t like or need.

I am busy trying to get rid of someone who is being kicked out, kicked off the team. The color green is a marker, trying to keep it in mind. Tension remains in my upper arms and neck. I am getting help to get rid of someone, thinking I am someone else. How do I know? Living under the roof like a refugee, they will clear out Costa’s stuff. I read “inlaid” when the word was undone. I broke the sentence off, knowing how it might continue.

There was a large map on a table. We were adding water to it with a kind of spongy roller device. Someone showed us a specific area to make sopping wet. Then someone whose origin was that area came by and we showed her that her area was really wet. At first she didn’t get it, but we knew eventually she’d be upset. There was a wild man with little black legs and a handlebar moustache who showed up like a crazy revolutionary. It was if his legs were singed. I forgot to call Paul on the Epiphany. Then someone in my dream complains.

Later in a new dream there is a storage unit that has a way to remove something from it because there is a blue light inside it. The blue light is key. I am not worried that my dreams slip away, I no longer feel worried and I sense that I am no longer searching and anxious about it. The search is mild. The blue light keeps shining.

She was tall and elegant; the woman who came to stay, but there was something wrong. I sensed it. The back details of this dream have faded but I remember the woman offering to show us. She closed the door of my bedroom and began to peel off her clothes layer by layer. There were several layers: a long sleeved dress, followed by another, then an underskirt and two t shirts, an under blouse; so many layers of clothes and as she took one layer off after another I guessed out loud,

‘It’s because you’re thin’.

I was right, I could see already her pencil thin arms, but hers was not an ordinary thinness and when she finally peeled off the final layer of her underwear and stood before us naked I could see that it was a problem not only of thinness but also of digestion or some such ailment. It had so impacted on the texture and thickness of her skin that every item of her internal organs and structure was visible beneath the thin layer of her skin. Like a translucent membrane, it held the parts in place.

I could see the shape of her heart beating, the layered lines of her rib cage. Her intestines coiled like a thick string of beads and the little sack of her stomach bulged to one side in the middle near a smaller sack, her bladder.

I write this to describe the image of a woman who carried her insides on the outside, like a heart on her sleeve and this to the extreme. She reminded me of those illustrations you see in doctor’s surgeries, the ones designed to demonstrate the location of the various parts of the human body, the parts we cannot see.

In my dream the woman became my child and I knew that I should feed her. I sat her in front of a bowl of chicken pieces and began to entice her with other foods, left over Japanese food, sushi and sashimi. Elsewhere I took some noodles from the plate of another child who was eating nearby and encouraged my thin girl to eat up more and more. I knew that if I could feed her well enough over time her skin would grow thick and she would no longer need to hide herself behind these multiple layers of clothes.

I and three other people (an old man and two women) were trying to invade Cuba on makeshift rafts. One raft to a person. They were just boards nailed together, tho each of us had a mound, a couple of feet high, of cooked rice for provisions. The old man was lost at sea, but the rest of us were picked up immediately as we went ashore. Our plan had been to attend a dance there, to let the Cubans know that we were not a danger, and to leave wallets behind that had lots of cash in Cuban bills for people to live a little more easily.

The head nun, who was a cross between the head mistress from my schooldays in the late sixties, Sister M, and the principle of my daughters’ school now, handed me a slip of paper. It included a description of the role I was to perform in the school play.

I looked at it briefly and felt disappointed. I was standing in the middle of the schoolyard down near the quadrangle when the head mistress, whom I shall from now on call Sister M, came over to ask whether I was happy with my part.

‘I’m not really,’ I dared to say. I dared only tell her because somewhere earlier in my dream I had read through the school manual and in it I had seen written that there was a place to complain about parts allocated in the school play if you were not satisfied.

Even as I told Sr M that I was unhappy with my part I thought I should keep it to myself. I should have swallowed my pride, but it was too late, it was out.

‘It’s a small part, I know Sister M said but we need to give the main parts to those who are best able to take on particular roles, even so this one gives you a chance to demonstrate your skills.’

One of my sisters stood nearby. She came over to see what all the fuss was about. Sister M left and my sister read through the description of my role.

‘It’s not so bad,’ she said. ‘You’re part of the roaring forties, a small part maybe, but you’ll be on stage most of the time.’

I knew then that I should not have complained but the idea of being on stage as part of the chorus in the background, nodding and smiling, gesticulating or whatever else was required, did not pleased me. Against my wishes, I began to cry. By the time Sister M arrived back with two other possible roles in the play that I might prefer I was sobbing.

I did not want these parts. It was okay. I felt apologetic and embarrassed, but as I write down my memory of the dream now, my sorrow was tinged with anger. I knew it would not do to cry, but I could not stop. Then whether I decided it was strategic for me to suggest that I was worried about other things, like how I might do in my final year at school, I do not know. But I took this line.

It was around March during my matriculation, the title of my final year at school. It seemed a more legitimate thing to be upset about than the role I would have in the play. Besides as I sobbed, I realised it was true. I was worried about my schoolwork.

I had slipped behind. I had been sick, in the same way as my oldest daughter, who in the dream became my daughter who had been sick with glandular fever the year before and virtually lost the best part of her year ten year. I was now worried that I would slip further behind, too.

I had always imagined that when you work hard then you will be rewarded with good results, but this was not happening for me now. The role I had been allocated in the school play, a small bit part on the sidelines was proof of this.

The head mistress held me in her arms to comfort me but I felt on display, the entire school of girls were watching. I did not trust the head mistresses concern. In between turns of talking to me, and holding me between the folds of her billowing black habit, she was dealing with the usual school business. She was introducing herself to would be parents of other schoolgirls and dealing with other teachers’ concerns.

Every time she turned away, I looked around me through blurry eyes at the schoolyard and wondered what I was dong there. The whole place seemed to have changed. I could no longer feel connected and I was convinced I would now fail my final school year because things no longer made sense to me as they once did.

There was an entire subject, a foreign language, something like Polish that I was meant to have studied that year but I knew not one single word of it. I wanted to tell Sister M about this but she was busy talking to yet another set of parents and by the time she came back to me the rest of the school were seated at tables for lunch. I was now back in boarding school.

Sister M looked around for a space at a table for me. The girls were all familiar to me but I could not feel a connection with any of them. I sat down at the far end near a group of girls mid conversation. They looked at me but did not engage. They did not ask questions nor did they seem interested in why I was upset. They were not judgemental about it. They were simply indifferent. I could have been invisible for all they cared.

Scatty dreams, of schoolgirls gathering in our lounge room as if they are camping. I’m looking after a small child/baby who can only now just walk and talk. I see that someone has painted over the check tiles in the bathroom in deep red paint. It could have looked good to begin with but the paint was not right for the surface and it is peeling in places, cracked in others and flaking off in large hunks at the points of greatest activity.

A lizard appears from under the skirting board, long and black with a face like Batman, or Zorro, a face whose patterning gives the appearance of a mask and the lizard darts into the room where the schoolgirls congregate. They seem unbothered but my baby boy follows and wants to engage with the lizard.

I warn him off. He’s too young. I tell him when he is older and taller, then he can talk to the lizard, but not now.

For now I hope the lizard will disappear but I see that the lizard is also interested in my child. Perhaps because they are of similar height, at least they would be were the lizard to stand on its hind legs and reach for the ceiling. The lizard and the small boy eye one another off until I scoop the boy into my arms, and the lizard streaks away.

I turn to the gathering of schoolgirls with the odd boy in between.

‘Could you guys please tidy this place up before the end of the day?'

One person only responds with assurances that they will. The rest are silent. I comment on this to my oldest daughter who has walked into the room. I do not want to embarrass her. This is easy to do at this time of the day, but I want help with the mess.

I had a valuable vintage guitar--like the psychedelically painted Les Paul that Jimmy Page played with Led Zeppelin. On a guitar stand it rolled down a long, straight road, across the Canadian border, and into the garage of a house like Chester Brown's drawings of his boyhood home in Montreal. From a distance I watched a man pick up my guitar, look it over, and stow it in the back of a truck parked in the garage. Guitars filled and surrounded the truck: apparently the garage was a guitar warehouse.

Later I walked down the road to retrieve my property. After I crossed the Canadian border the houses grew charmingly antiquated and decrepit, the pavement rain-dark and grass-cracked. Everything exuded a barely perceptible aura of Europeanness.

At the garage a young man with pink spiked hair greeted me. He wore a long, olive-drab military coat with cryptic patches and black leather punk boots. He looked like a young Gary Oldman. At first he feigned ignorance of my guitar and invited me to search the truck, but when I persisted he led me to a corner of the garage and showed me my guitar. It was badly damaged. The young man admitted that he had played it and "pushed it to the limit." To quell my rage he swore up and down that he would repair it. I said I'd come back later, but I knew that my guitar was permanently ruined.

Lost in San Francisco, I met a preacher who couldn’t speak, a tall man concerned with giants, a homeless man who wanted what I didn’t have, a trio of young thugs who threatened to beat me but didn’t follow through, a little boy searching for his mom — I followed him down a side street and saw him safely home, then crossed beneath a dripping stairwell where a young man was playing a marble game and betting against himself ... reaching in my pocket I found what I thought might be a phone, part TV remote, part bright-red plastic toy, and was about to call my son when I came to a flight of metal stairs leading down, turned at the landing, took a narrow ladder the rest of the way, and there I met another boy who said “Don’t renounce me” three times as if I already had, and I fished in my pocket and found a sodden book of matches, only one of which seemed sound, and I tried to strike it to shed some light upon our shoes, to prove to him that mine were not mine, and his were his.

I was using a pair of hand shears to clip the grass growing along the edge of a sidewalk when I was joined by a man who was curious about what I was doing. His hair was white and very short. His head was narrow. He was wearing glasses. He asked if he could see the shears. I stood up and handed them to him. As I did, they became an ax in his hand. His first swing was aimed at the grass. The blow landed perfectly just where I had stopped cutting. He took a breath and adjusted his grip. My body tensed with fear. His second swing was aimed at my neck. I yelled myself awake.

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.

My dream comes back to me. I was at a conference, or maybe it was more like a holiday at a camping ground, where people were staying in small huts or in tents attached to their cars.

It was morning and there were people everywhere. It was difficult to find a free toilet or bathroom and I noticed that the system of each waiting in turn to occupy a bathroom one after the other seemed hopeless. People were skipping the queue, which was not visible, so I took it upon myself to organise the use of showers.

Whenever someone new arrived on the scene I told them where they stood in the invisible queue. ‘You’re sixth in line,’ I said to two men who had come upon two vacant cubicles and were about to go in. There are others ahead of you. They resented it, I could see, and one woman who was about to take her turn stood back and let one of the men jump the queue because she could not bear his anger. I wondered at my presumptuousness, that I should orchestrate this affair. But no one complained, at least not openly.

I stood looking at a billboard on wheels, advertising events. There was a photo on one side of last year’s conference and as I looked I saw that it came alive. The photo turned into a video. It was a re-run of last year’s conference, which I had for some reason enjoyed so much more than this one. Then some of the characters from the video, some of the women from last year’s conference, materialised into people at this year’s conference. They came to say hello. They were pleased to see me.

Another woman came over and complained because she had heard through the grapevine that I had described her as lonely.

‘I am not lonely,’ she said. I felt defensive. I could not remember saying this about her and even if I had, what did it matter. And what about the things she and others had said about me? That I was … And then I told her of my decision to withdraw from the life of the organization that had so haunted me over these last several months.

We stood outside in the morning sunlight in a wide grassy field. I could smell freshly mown hay. I had entered a different world from the one I usually occupied and I could never go back, except perhaps in my memory. All this I considered as I stood talking to this woman from the past, and who could not understand where and why I had gone.

I’m standing at a dirty sink in an old warehouse. Blood is running down my face. There’s a curved gash under the left cheekbone. I thought it was healed. I thought it was a scar. Now it’s open again. My eye, a separate entity watching in horror, also begins to bleed. I turn the faucet, but there’s no water. I set off through the warehouse. There are dusty shafts of light coming through holes in the roof. They strike the floor at odd angles, like searchlights. I see a man, a cousin who died in his seventies almost thirty years ago. He’s wearing a tie and a crumpled brown suit. I say hello. He looks at me but doesn’t answer. I wonder if he can see the blood. I leave him behind. I hear what sounds like water running in a bathtub. I step outside. My wife is there. I say, “I thought you were going to tell me.” She replies gently, “I did tell you. Don’t you remember?” She hands me a cool wet cloth. I press it against the wound. “Almost,” I say, but the image of it is quickly gone.

In my dream this morning I was back at my old school Vaucluse convent about to sit my final year English exam. In some ways I felt prepared. I had studied hard but for some reason it also felt like I was ill prepared as though the exam date had snuck up on me. I had earlier been shopping for clothes. I chose to visit Gidget in my search for a new jumper. I wanted something hip and colourful, something in an unusual style, something that might stand out from the conventional jumpers we wore every day. The shop was crowded and rather than queue for the dressing rooms I took a couple of jumpers I had already selected outside to my car and tried them on out there in the street. This did not seem such a remarkable thing to do until I considered the fact that it could look like shoplifting. How had I managed to walk so blithely out of the shop with two security-coded jumpers under my arm and not so much as one person batted an eyelid.

Now it was time to go for the exam. The entire year twelve class was lined up at the door ready to walk through the school gardens and into the assembly hall where we would sit our exam. Once Sister Marie, our English teacher had issued the order, we moved out carelessly in raggle-taggle groups of threes and fours all talking noisily. She did not object. It was fine for us to wander at our leisure to the tense destination that awaited us or so I thought. I was conscious of feeling that I would have liked more focus. Then I realised I had forgotten a cardigan or jumper. I would need one during the exam. It could get very cold in the assembly hall especially having to sit for hours.

‘I need to get my jumper’ I said to Sister Marie as I ran back to the class room.

‘Don’t bother,’ she said. But I had already gone and was back at the classroom, which was now sealed off at the downstairs entry way and I had to find some other means of getting to my school bag. I did eventually somehow in that magical way you do in dreams when doors disappear and flights of stairs can be mounted in a breath. I found one of the new jumpers, which I had eventually decided to buy and rushed back to the exam.

Reading time was already over and I looked at the questions. The exam paper was full of illustrations that seemed to come alive and to speak to me in much the way paintings come to life in the Harry Potter films. In the first question we needed to fill in the missing word, ‘mellow rhymes with…?’ I knew the answer as ‘yellow’ and was furious when I over heard one girl sitting nearby whispering the answer to another.

'They’re cheating,’ I wanted to call out. In my dream I am now ashamed to say, I dobbed, but Sister Marie did not seem to care. She was not nearly so fussed about the conduct of my fellow exam participants as I.

On one side I noticed a young woman sitting for the exam with her baby in tow. That will make things difficult I thought but the bab at that stage seemed contented and I thought to myself depending how well I go in finishing this exam, I’ll offer to help out with the baby to give the other woman a chance to finish her paper. On the other side of me my youngest daughter was picking through the paper. It was hard for her. She was only of primary school age, about six or seven.

There was a commotion outside in the quadrangle and the two cheaters got up and went outside to look. ‘More fools they,’ I thought, but then my youngest daughter wanted to join them. I tried to stop here.

‘Let her be, ‘ Sister Marie said. ‘It’s only a trial run for her.’

I knew my need to have things in order as I wanted them was over the top and tried to get back into the exam. The questions fascinated me. They seemed to be relaying a narrative in their own right. The story of someone who had lost her baby. Something akin to the details that exist in Helen Garner’s book, The First Stone – a complex plot I needed to untangle and analyse. The woman who had lost her baby refused to speak up about it and everyone else remained silent.

Amber Tamblyn, at Poetry Foundation's blog, Harriet

[a continuation of the recent previous dream]

I was dead. And here in my dream I was driving my own hearse. Somehow I was to leave by the route I had driven there and I had to return something to some point off of La Brea down an alley. Under my breath i was singing repeatedly with a certain triumph how few get to drive their own hearse. I could begin to smell my own body but it was not a bad smell yet, being fresh. This somehow pleased me for the moment. From my pockets I removed a giant ring of too many keys. Here was a burden I still carried. I was awoken to a quick rasp on my screen door. No one was there.

[Possible dream response to 'The Red Book']

I am on a high rock face leaning against the wall. Unseen passer-bys comment how what a good monument to Christ this could be made into and they place all types of “stations" around me. I agree to stand there and remain with my arms outstretched from time to time. It is decided though that this center figure who is no longer myself should be painted to remain the central focus of the monument. All around is painted one of the most beautiful Burnt Sienna I have ever seen. His body is painted this color too and his cloth a muted red that is quite harmonious to the background color. Voice says here is the painted Christ. The paint though is poisonous as it would be for this person and he becomes sick and is taken down ill before he dies.

I remember dreaming that I was Rod Serling. I mean, I was watching Rod Serling, but at the same time I was Rod Serling. And I was thinking, "I need to find some teleplay-writers; trouble is, no one does that anymore except Jodie Foster." Then I walked into a sort of Quonset hut where shadowy people wound among antique cheval mirrors, tapestries, mahogany furniture--expensive stuff. A woman who resembled my Aunt Cathy--similar dark, shoulder-length hair--sat at a table near the entrance. "Do you have any teleplay-writers?" I asked her. "Hmm," she said. "We've got Jodie Foster in a booth at the back, but that's about it."

I remember a nightmare I had when I was 14, shortly after my sojourn at a church camp. I dreamed that I was sitting in the back seat of a car parked in front of the camp's general store. The engine began to skreek and skritter like the cassette-player I used at the time. Suddenly a gargantuan panther burst out from under the hood--rather like the baby monster c-sectioning himself in Alien. His murderous eyes flashed; his muscles rippled horrifyingly under his sleek black fur. He galloped toward the car, leapt, and rammed the windshield with his head. The resultant crack-web seemed to enmesh me as the slightly dazed panther trotted away from the car, preparing to hurl himself at the windshield again... I awoke with a start.