I dreamed I was walking down several tiers of stairs that remind me of the green, man-made mesas at Cahokia, only the mount I'm descending is made of a gritty white rock, like colorless sandstone, and I don't think about what's underneath or how it got there.  I'm overwhelmed with the people I'm passing on my way, and try to focus on where I'm going, which is a dream landscape with a pond that is every familiar pond.  I am aware in the dream that I'm going to be treated to a repeat visit to this pond.  I love to see it, dream whatever dream I have that includes it.  Almost at the bottom, an arm reaches out and a hand grabs my wrist just long enough to stop me and make me look, just hard enough to bring me into the moment.  It is someone I haven't thought of in a long time.  At least, it's someone I haven't seen in my mind's eye for many years the way I see him now, which is as he used to be before we grew to resent and distrust-- perhaps even loathe-- one another.  He seems innocent to me in this moment, and I feel myself flood with warmth.  A mothering impulse stirs.  He's just about to tell me what he's thinking.  I'm just about to find out whether he's going to explain something, berate me, or ask me to stay in this group of people with him, go through the errand to the top all over again.  I am on the cusp of hearing perhaps that he is going to say he wants to come with me to the familiar pond-- when the thought of the familiar pond breaks the spell and I find myself walking backwards down the stairs, making my excuse to the confusion of his expression, and then turning around to finish my descent.  At the bottom, I run into a field of grass that somehow isn't itchy around my bare legs, and is alive with insects that don't threaten me at all.  The tree line opens up in the distance to reveal a wide path and I am swiftly making my way there.  I woke up knowing that I got to the pond and had a good dream, where I met interesting people and creatures and pulled amazing things out of the water.  I want to remember that part, but all I can remember a few hours after waking is the descent and being stopped for just a second on my way. 

Dream 1:

 

Bobbing in kayaks, in the wake of motor boats, we are a set of something, red and green water flowers, kitschy salt and pepper shakers.  We are a man and a woman.  Little boats bumping and slogging into one another on Figure Eight Lake.  We see A-frame houses appearing at the lake shore, emerging from the woods like people, approaching casually by foot, and settling in to survey all the activity of the holiday weekend.  There is a sense of community apparent between the houses.  I woke up, feeling as if I'd dreamt of simple mathematics, geometry, geomancy, patterns. 

 

Dream 2:

 

I see only the tops of people’s heads very often in dreams, usually out of windows or through windows, just the tops of all sorts of heads passing by.  Dreaming early this morning, I was in a museum, walking by the entrance to a ramp down to a lower level of the museum.  I saw the top of a woman’s head appear and disappear as she walked down the spiral ramp, obscured otherwise by the ramp’s high walls.  I call out “Dorothy!”  And walk back to enter the ramp, to see if I was correct about the identity of this top of someone’s head.  And it is Dorothy.  And I have a sense, as we are hugging one another, that she knows it means something special that I have identified her by only the top of her head in this place that neither one of us would usually be.  She’s wearing a pale aqua colored dress that is strikingly lovely against the color of her skin. She's cheerful and finely turned out, going to a summer wedding, she says.  “But it’s deep winter”, I say.  And she replies that the wedding is inside the museum, but the theme is “summer wedding”.  I think this is a fantastic idea, and I tell her so, and she replies “Well, I hope so!  It is your wedding, after all.”  In the dream, it seems perfectly reasonable, that Dorothy would be informing me of my own wedding, the day of.  The exterior walls of the museum are made mostly of windows, and the place is alive with quickly-changing afternoon light.

Fifteen days on the road and dreams filling in with U.S. Army trucks-- deuce and a half, ten ton fatigued monsters being prepped and sold to corporations to do some kind of mysterious labor in Guatemala. Color coded spec sheets shuffling around and I start to imagine trucks as people, agents, with a human sort of fate, condition. Mercenary or trafficked, I don't know. Hollowed out, silent, too expensive to own, and what for? So gratuitous for camping or any honest work, and that coming to light with red poppies and purple bluebells whirring by us on the highways, and a smell like basil and coca-cola everywhere. At home again, and sleeping alone always like a child, the sleeping alone feels like the disoriented dream, and remembering real instead the twelve states' bodies and trap of cold, wet open air, fire-surviving, brass band Broadway musical, Auburns, Cords, and Duesenbergs flashing down terrazzoed country routes, meat as a matter of fact, in some homemade version of love, and being given the unexpected gift of a pale pink bicycle forged specifically to suit only me and my purpose...

He's in his forge, the tiny wooden building's window glowing orange, but static, no movement in the light, as if trapped and blurred in a photograph. And I feel like a camera. I'm a witness device, recording something happening at dusk, as if this is a particular day. Always with him, ice and gravel cracking under foot. I take some evidence, an inventory: carpenter's musk; manipulated tin; rust colored paint; talk and tedium; dinner in the near future; a bench; blood/blushing; blue sweater tattoo. Wherever we move, he and I are always the same distance from one another, I begin to suspect. I test this every way I know-- which involves saying and listening and other things, smaller and making less sense-- and find that it's true. The exact distance seems to be constant, no matter what.