It's the nineteenth century, and I've been cast in a play representing the workings of nature. There are hundreds of other actresses in the play, but we haven't been given our parts yet. The director sends us into a room with rows of soft, colorful nightgowns and tells us to change, leaving our corsets behind. Many of the women are nervous and uncomfortable with this costuming, but I'm looking forward to wearing something less restrictive. I choose a long blue nightgown and put it on behind a curtain. I'm thinking I'm going to be cast as Neptune, because of the color of my costume, but the director sees me and says "Dawn. Definitely Dawn," and sends me off to rehearse.

I go into a darkened room where all I can make out is a cloth draped over something vaguely human-shaped. I crawl underneath and find another woman in a blue gown, who tells me we're to represent Dawn together. She hands me a flashlight-shaped thing, which I turn on. Beautiful colored lights come from it, and my partner tells me that when our cue comes we're to turn these on and sing a song. I say I haven't learned the song, and she tells me it goes "ooooo, DAWN!" I try to sing that but she keeps correcting me--I can't get it right. She says not to worry, all we really have to do is sing along with a recording--she shows me a device that apparently has the song on it. I ask if I can listen to it, in order to learn the song, but she says we're not to turn it on until our cue, because it's very loud. I ask what IS our cue, and she doesn't answer.

We sit in silence for a while. I'm dying to hear the song. Trying to make it look like an accident, I turn on the device. "Ooooo, DAWN!" goes the device, and it is, indeed, very loud. My partner is panicking, and we try to muffle the sound with pillows, but it's too late--the director is upon us. He knows I was the one who turned on the song, and he asks me to go with him into another room. "Do you see why I asked that you not turn that on until your cue?" he asks. I say I do, and apologize. All along he's been very gruff and intimidating, but now he takes me in his arms and kisses the top of my head. I'm overcome by a feeling of complete peace.

He walks me back to my place, which is now on a hill under the stars. No sooner am I there than my partner and I hear our cue, and we turn on the device and our flashlights and begin singing. It's joyful! Together we walk down the hill. We see the actresses playing animals and planets and Greek deities, all beautifully costumed and dancing, and I'm singing at the top of my lungs "ooooo, DAWN," and that is when I wake up laughing.

I have been away in the country for a few days and I’m driving my husband’s car, mindful the whole time that I must take good care of it. I park it by the side of the road near the hotel in which I’m staying.

It is nearly time to go home. I am now inside the hotel packing to leave. I am having trouble fitting all my belongings into my suitcase. Somehow I have been left with other people’s stuff, bulky jumpers and scarves that one of my companions, a woman has decided not to pack into her own suitcase. In the bathroom I find signs of my husband’s left over toiletries. I wonder whether I should pack these, too, but I can barely find room in my own case for all my stuff.

Instinctively I know there is something amiss with my husband’s car. I go outside to see it careering down the road driverless. I have been aware of this, that in certain unpredictable circumstances the car can take off by itself. Still, I wonder whether one of my daughters has played with the ignition and accidentally started it. I chase after the car hoping to reach it somehow and then stop it, even though I know this impossible. The car turns a corner and is out of sight. I call out to some men in a field nearby and ask for their help. We race across the field in the hope that we might cut the car off, assuming it continues to follow the road.

Under a row of eucalypts on the other side of the field we watch as cars rush past. I cannot see my husband’s car and wonder whether it has already crashed.

And there it is, worse for wear, the whole side panel bashed in, the front crumpled. It looks as though it is running out of puff now. It leaves the road and rides up into an embankment where it collides with a row of small bushes. I imagine that we might be able to fix it but I will need to tell my husband first.

Then I am at an exhibition of racing cars. A small child, perhaps one of my daughters, sits inside the cockpit of one of these cars. It is a toy car with metal pedals inside, the sort that existed when I was a child. The little girl is trying to work out how to get the car going. People mill about to watch. All seems calm and yet I sense at any moment this car too might suddenly spring to life of its own accord and take the girl with it.

Last night I dreamed I was at the grocery store and Paris, a very skinny and active cat, was in the basket. His legs kept going through the holes in the basket. I was trying to find food that wouldn't make me ill and trying to keep Paris in the basket at the same time. I found some bananas and wheeled the basket outside where Paris leapt free and was immediately cornered by a huge hairy beast of an animal. The animal was the size of an adult raccoon but covered in matted fur and spikes and had the long sharply curved teeth of a rat. It was wearing a pink studded collar and had a pet tag around its neck. Paris was ready to tangle but I managed to grab him and hold him tightly and the beast lumbered off.

In the dream someone smoking or eating [?] Moncatels. Your search - moncatels -

did not match any documents.

Philip Dadson back from New York brought with him a new improved amazing

way of printing out from computers, a long white rectangular stick that he pressed

onto paper briefly. How did that work?

I dreamed this morning that I had decided to sell up in the city and move to the country. I planned to sell my half of the house here in Hawthorn and buy a property in Maldon. I would share this new property with D, an old acquaintance, but D is someone about whom I have mixed feelings. In some ways I’d go so far as to say I hate her. Certainly my decision to sell up my shared house with my husband seemed to be fuelled by my anger towards him and I was aware in the dream of wanting to live two lives, one here, one there.

I went to look at a house that was up for sale in country Maldon. An elderly couple currently occupied it. They agreed to let me look through – large rooms, high ceilings and the smell of new mown hay. The rooms in this house seemed to run on forever, huge rooms with wood panelling half way up the walls and pressed steel in places down the hall way. It had been cobbled together from a variety of different styles. None of the furniture was consistent, a bit like the house of one of my daughter’s boyfriends, which I had visited yesterday. This boy’s parents own a huge retro and antique furniture business to which their house is testimony. Their house, too, like the house in my dream, like the house in which I live now is cluttered, and full of stuff.

There were so many signs of life here in this house in Maldon and so little room for putting things away. I loved this house, which I toyed with buying but in my dream it became evident that I had a debt I would not be able to honour. The debt was a hidden debt of $300,00.00 and unbeknown to me it would sit hidden for three years and eventually the bank would call it in.

The daughter of a friend came into my dream then. She seemed distressed. She was followed shortly after by two of the staff from Bunnings, a hardware store chain. They complained that they had found in her car goods that she had taken from one of their stores without paying.

‘Give them the $13.00,’ I said. ‘Just pay them.’

She fumbled in her purse and as she did so I took the money from mine and paid these two men, who took then took the money and walked out without so much as a glance back.

I went to a reunion of ‘old girls’ at Vaucluse, my senior school. I travelled through the grounds with one of my younger sisters who had also attended the school, one year below me. At one point we decided to travel down a long chute. It would be steep, I thought, like going down a slide in the park; only this one was long. I could almost feel my body torn apart in anticipation of the speed, but once inside the chute we slid down gracefully, not too fast as I had feared, but comfortably as if there were some traction between our bums and the surface of the tunnel. It was made of blue plastic.

After we landed at the bottom we stood inside a small room at whose centre stood a table covered in a fancy silk cloth. Another girl, who also once went to our school, a girl who had boarded with me, whose name was the same as that of my sister, soon followed us. But this girl was big, whereas my sister now and in the dream is and was pretzel thin.

There was a note pad on the table that included names and addresses. I flicked through it hoping to find a sign of my favourite nun from school days. But her name was not there.

Then I was inside a church with a gathering of ‘old girls’ from my class. A few recognised me but no one seemed interested in taking time to talk to me beyond an initial hello. I looked at the faces of these ‘old girls’. I peered through the present into the past, past layers of wrinkles and grey hair, to find the girls I might remember.

I was desperate to find someone who had been meaningful to me when I was at school, but before I knew it I was preparing for the train trip home. The train took ages to arrive. After I had stepped inside, it took even more time to assemble itself for the trip. Seats folded and unfolded, panels snapped open and shut, as of they were orchestrated by some invisible machine.

Once it took off the train travelled fast, so fast that some people, including me were thrown out of their seats. My body bashed up against a partition midway through the carriage and I held onto a couple of small children who had also been flung from their seats. When the train reached its destination I realised we were back where we had started.

The weather had turned foul by now, with sleet and rain bordering on snow. It was dark and freezing cold. I tried to walk across the mud to the next train. Three other trains arrived at the same time. I had no idea which one to take.

I could not get traction in the mud and seemed to be walking without getting anywhere. Someone hoisted me up onto the train, but I realised almost immediately that I was on the wrong train yet again. I woke up breathless.

Several of my friends, who are suddenly much older, have been summoned to “the war.” It breaks my heart to see them as they arrive one by one, uprooted from their families, lives, and cares, to receive their orders and gear. One with whom I’m very close stops at a little wooden booth called the “supply depot,” but the only supplies left are pencils. He takes an unsharpened one from the counter, then turns and looks my way. His questioning expression reminds me that I’m supposed to accompany him to the train, which I haven’t seen, but imagine as a human cattle car like those Solzhenitsyn described in The Gulag Archipelago. But instead of showing him the way, I lead him out into a field of bones, thinking, “Someday, someone, somewhere, has to say no.”

Home is a strange place, my father here, alive again, knee-deep in a pile of leaves. Angles and eaves and broken-down tables; shadows on paths through the trees. I want to smoke, but each match is snuffed by the breeze. The book falls apart in my hand. I notice a car in the yard. My father is behind the wheel. I slide in on the passenger side. The dash is alive, a futuristic arrangement of buttons and blinking lights. One of them is white — much to my surprise, it’s a cigarette lighter. In my father’s hand, the end of it burns like a star. I hold up a large uncured tobacco leaf. Night intervenes; with an old rag, he wipes a constellation from the windshield.

aaargh the dreams... was about to fly off to Japan with G. for some reason the airport was on the lower east side near delancey street... I stopped in a little store to buy some olive oil... why would I need to bring olive oil? and then remembered I hadn't brought my cell phone or charger...so back to some apartment... not ours... but we'd been staying there... almost no furniture... an apparition slipped in... female, I think... maybe a homeless person using the bathroom... although too much like an apparition to actually use a bathroom... and then she slipped out again... and then I realized... Gary was nowhere to be seen... the flight was leaving in a half an hour... I still didn't have my cellphone... I thought OK I'll rent one... but where was Gary?... I noticed the olive oil was dark, like unprocessed argan oil...

I dreamed:

Barrelhouse Dave was pissed about a blog post I wrote about Barrelhouse. He told me to stop trying to be funny and stick to writing about "minor" poetry

of a woman poet who wore blue face make-up

I downloaded a bunch of scary/Halloween movies to watch with Chris, but there was only one he was willing to see

I made up with a writer with who I recently had an icky interaction

An editor from the West Wind Review accepted my poems and suggested I use the nickname "Sous Rature." Then my sister told me that's a stupid idea and I shouldn't.

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

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

I recently had a dream that was so vivid it left me seeing ghosts everywhere (in a good way). I dreamt that I took a walk along the familiar downtown streets of my hometown, Lewiston, Maine (I'd just been reading and researching historical sites, old industrial era mills, etc.) and suddenly there was a suspension of time as we know it. As I walked along a familiar sidewalk in the present, everyone who'd ever walked down that street at any given time in the past were walking their routes too, at the same time. The layers of activity created a bustling scene, yet everyone was somewhat transparent and able to walk through one another without interruption or notice. The longer ago the person walked the route, the fainter their image. I crossed paths with old relatives and loved ones departed while in their youths. I called to them without connecting, but felt the comfort of their presence, nonetheless. I specifically remember walking alongside my Uncle Larry, my father's older brother who died in 1945 in Belgium during WWII. I never met him, but have heard enough about him to realize that I'd have loved to have had my Uncle Larry to enjoy and grow up knowing. I just savored walking with him. I couldn't reach him to speak with, but his presence was a comfort. Since that dream I have a hard time looking at things as separate from the past. I also know, as a consequence that my own footprints resonate into the future and affect its outcome, even if ever so subtly. Uncle Larry, because of who he was and his interactions with his brother (my father), Claude and countless others, played a role in shaping who I am. There cannot help but be a resonating influence, even if a very subtle one. I learned that while dreaming and awaking to a new understanding. That is also what art at its best should do: awaken us to new understandings. I think a great work of art should invite the viewer to places completely unknown, yet mysteriously familiar. What comes from the subconscious, or dream state is the stuff of universal truths because it has no agenda except to become known.

In last night's dream, Alli & I were in conflict.
There was the appearance of a formula around which our argument circulated; it was this:



x [ or else = or ≠ ]



Cute cues, but it was a bad dream.

I go with my husband to visit our new flat some ten minutes away from where we live. We still possess our ordinary large house, as it is now where we live with three of our four children though one of them, the youngest instead of being fifteen years old in the dream is still a baby on the brink of walking. The flat that we will soon occupy – only my husband and I for short spells, for the occasional weekend or at nights during the week when my husband cannot stand the pressure of life at home any longer – is in a state of incompleteness. There are boxes stacked one above the other, some opened and some minus half their contents, in almost every room. It has a living-out-of-a-suitcase feel.

That’s okay I think because we will never live here. It’s just an occasional escape from the rigours of ordinary home life. Of course we must take the baby with us. We cannot leave her at home alone, even with her older sisters. The flat has two storeys and already I worry about how she will manage the stairs.

At one stage I start to walk around the flat in the company of a friend and neighbour. I offer her the grand tour. By the time we reach the upstairs bedroom I realise how unliveable this place is. We cannot sleep here. The beds are disassembled. Even the packages of tea on the kitchen sink are still sealed in hard-to-get-at boxes.

We plan to take a bus back home but we are not sure how to get there. Then we are in the car and I urge my husband to follow the blue Ventura bus. It goes to the school, and once we arrive at the school we will recognise where we are. We follow the bus past the schoolyard, which has been cleaned up and extended over the holidays. The back of the schoolyard beyond the classroom buildings extends down some way into a gully. It slopes in stages with a couple of long cliff like drops onto flat grassy plateaux.

How can they allow children to get to such steep ridges? I wonder. This schoolyard is dangerous.

I wake up.

Voices wake me. I roll out of bed, slip my shoes on, follow the sound outside. A fine summer night. Stars and a bright full moon. The garage door is open. I move through the garage to the back door. The voices are coming from the other side. I open the door, step out, and the door bumps shut behind me.

Two of my neighbors—two women—are finishing a conversation. They don't greet or even look at me, but the mood isn't unfriendly. They're cheerful because of the children. Down the mountain (a strange mountain, not the one we really live on) I can see half a dozen young ones playing hide-and-seek among the trees.

One of the women says some kind of goodbye to her friend (I can't make out the words) and sets off down the steep slope. She disappears into the forest. I can hear her calling the children home. The other woman heads off the other way, up the mountain. She doesn't speak or glance my way. I don't feel slighted, just pleasantly invisible. The mountainside sloping up from where I stand looks strange: a series of circular stone terraces with stone steps spiraled around them. My neighbor must climb the steps to move from one terrace to the next. She appears and disappears as she climbs, dwindling with each higher terrace, until she's out of sight. I look back down the mountain: no one. The black pines look intensely distinct in the strong moonlight. The stars overhead seem larger than usual and oddly active—quivering or writhing. I feel completely alone and a little afraid. "Time for bed," I tell myself out loud.

The door back into the garage is locked, so I decide to go around the house and come in through the side door. But when I clear the corner of the garage I see this isn't my house. I'm on a flagstone terrace. The sliding door a few feet away is open. In a state of confusion, as if to verify that this is really not my house, I slip through the sliding door and into an unfamiliar living room or den. From a tiled entryway across the room a staircase climbs in my direction and vanishes into the ceiling. Off to the left there's a shadowy kitchen. The only light comes from a narrow trapezoid of moonlight on the carpet. I move toward the stairway, wondering if anyone's home and if they might be sleeping upstairs. I slide my left hand along the wall that encloses the space under the stairs, feeling for a light switch.

From behind me comes a man's voice—strong but not fearless. "What are you doing in my house?" I try to turn and face him, but can't: I feel almost paralyzed. I try to say it's just me but my throat too is paralyzed. So I keep inching my way along the wall as if he might not notice. The man, voice rising in pitch with each word, calls out behind me, "I have a gun!" I keep inching forward until I reach the foot of the stairs, where I stop. Across the entryway I see the light switch glowing beside the front door.

Suddenly I feel completely empty—a profound resignation. I know I'll never be able to reach that switch.

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

Last night I had two dreams. The first one I dreamed that Gideon opened a box and let out all the animal-flies. The crocodile-fly grew full size and bit my arm. Crocodiles and snakes occasionally bite me in dreams, so I'm kinda used to it. My second dream was about writing poems again. The first one was long and ended with an exclamation to Harriet! I was quite emphatic about that. Then I started my second poem, something about that story being over in my life.

In my dream last night we were traveling through strange parts of the countryside, a long way from home. Rocky gullies, deep valleys, overflowing waterfalls. At one point we met up with my oldest daughter, her partner and their two-year-old son.

We were in a bazaar buying jewelery. I pointed out to my daughter some of the extraordinary and cheap earrings that hung from a wall, when her son fell over. He fell heavily and the impact of the fall made his head fall off. I could only bear to look for an instant but I knew he had been decapitated, the blood a trickle from his headless neck. I looked away and was swallowed up with grief.

Last night I dreamed that I was getting a tattoo of a famous actor, a woman, but I was uncomfortable with it because I knew I didn’t really like her. But I was committed to the tattoo and felt I had to go forward with it. Luckily my tattoo artist refused me the tattoo and I was grateful. I can’t remember who she was.

In my second dream I was in school studying writing. Reb Livingston was my professor. She gave me a task of collating a bunch of manuscripts. Each manuscript was divided by a beautiful bookmark that Reb had made herself out of silk. Reb went home and I was there with another student. For some reason I got panicky and lost track of all the pieces of paper. Pages went missing. Bookmarks slid from one manuscript to another until they were all a mess. The other student, a blond woman, asked if I wanted to go to a party. We got in her car and she told me that she had read my diary and hated my writing. I yelled at her YOU READ MY DIARY? And she told me to get out of her car. I didn’t care that she hated my writing, but was horrified that she had invaded my privacy. I walked back to the school to fix the mess I had made of my task and there was a young man my son’s age asleep in the corner. He asked me if I wanted a glass of wine. He had the key to Reb’s desk. We opened it and found two beautiful hand blown goblets, a kind of pale rose color, and a bottle of wine. We started drinking and he told me that everyone in the class had read my diary, that it had been passed around in derision. Then he told me he was homeless so I invited him to live at my house for 3 months. I told him he was my son’s age and we didn’t have much money but we had a spare room in the basement and he would be warm and have food to eat etc. He gave me his father’s phone number so I could call and tell his father our plan but every time I dialed I got the wrong number.

In my dream I go to visit a doctor. Whatever I have gone to visit her about, she decides to use the opportunity for giving me a thorough examination. She takes my temperature, my blood pressure and examines my breasts. I am confident she will find nothing wrong but on first count she thinks she has detected ‘sclerosis’, she says, or some such thing. She pummels my left breast again and decides that no, she is wrong. It’s okay. Then she has me standing erect, naked and seems to be bouncing me up and down with her hand on my buttocks. I think she is checking for a prolapse or some such thing. She continues to examine me in the way some doctors do with no explanation as to the whys or wherefore of her approach.

I stand there meekly obedient even though I long for it all to be over. At one point I look towards the open doorway and notice my regular GP walk past. I have decided not to see this GP anymore.

For some reason whenever I go to see this particular doctor I feel guilty as if I have been bad – I have drunk too much wine, my diet is improper, I work too hard, am too irreligious – and I imagine she will scold me for it. In real life she never does this, but in my imagination she is constantly scolding me. In my dream I have taken action by deciding against seeing her anymore. My regular GP’s offsider, the one I am with now, is younger, younger even than me, but she does not leave me feeling guilty. She seems more down to earth, even as she examines me in this painstaking way. I feel less intimidated, more equal.

‘My patients are leaving me,’ I hear my regular GP say to her assistant as she walks past the open door. She looks in as she says this and looks directly at me. Our eyes lock and almost instantly I lose my balance and must spin around in order to save myself from falling.

‘I did not jerk away like that to avoid you,’ I say, as I regain my footing.

I feel a need to apologise but this is as much as I can say.

Then I am in the car park at the doctor’s surgery. I have offered to give my new doctor a lift home. She is eager to see her children. The car park is a mess of broken concrete and unmade roads. There is a traffic jam in the middle and I have trouble finding my car in the first instance and then of getting it out of the car park. Somehow I manage to do this and we are no longer in a car but on a train.

Flashback in my dream to a visit from an exchange student, a lovely girl from some place like France or Germany. She is puzzled by my family’s eccentricities, the way we lead such a chaotic life, irregular meals and odd ours. We sit in the back yard and a delivery man comes to drop off a machine my husband had ordered earlier but as he leaves he puts down a row of miniature figurines, characters from television and fairy tales – Snow White and the seven dwarfs, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck. I would like to keep these characters but I know they are not free. ‘

‘They are a seduction,’ I tell the girl. ‘The deliveryman put them there to get us to buy more.’

The exchange student decides she will take the train on her next journey and that she will sit on the train on the outside ledge where other passengers sit. I warn her that it is dangerous there. I see her on the train now clutching her suitcase in front.

‘It’s fine,’ she says, cheerfully. ‘There’s plenty of room.’ She is squeezed in like a sardine alongside several other passengers all nursing their luggage.

‘It won’t be so easy once the train gets going,’ I say. ‘It will wobble and jerk you all over the place.’

As the train takes off I see her in my mind’s eye. She has become me and I am desperately trying to keep my bottom perched safely on the narrow ledge. It is only a matter of time before I will be pitched off from the speeding train.

Our team of medieval warfare scholars is hiking across a European landscape. Coming over the crest of a hill, we all see the body of a 13th-century peasant woman, blond, wearing course but clean clothing and a snowy apron, her arms and legs extended cross-like, murdered, her hands and feet severed, her tongue cut out. She is young, pretty, her face calm. We all hover around the body, searching for clues, and all the other scholars, simultaneously, decide she represents a medieval murder that should be filed under "H"--I suppose that this is because of the symmetry of the butchery. I'm standing by her head, and I look out over her feet and notice, in the distance, an old tree that's been blasted by some storm, its roots torn out of the ground, hanging naked in the air. "Look over there," I say, pointing, and all the medieval scholars gasp and take off running towards this new clue, which appears to be much more "significant" than a murdered and mutilated peasant woman. The scholars enter a heated debate over what sort of tree this is, the exact trajectory of the tree trunk (north-north-west, or north-west-west?), the causative event (earthquake? storm? war? supernatural force?). "H" is left far behind; this new event merits a "V", a "W", possibly even an "X". The scholars argue passionately, pacing around the huge felled tree. I realize that this is the sort of event is what they long for, an event that is much more mysterious than the mundane ritual murder of the peasant woman. The tree has druid connotations; it's ancient. Indeed, the death of this gorgeous old tree--either through natural or human means--fills me with deep sorrow while the discovery of the peasant woman's body only made me feel a little sad.

On the morning of my presentation at a life writing conference called The Story of the Story I had a dream that felt so real it still seems as though it actually happened. I dreamed that when it came time for me to present my paper in the Noel Stockdale room within the library at Flinders University I went ahead of the others to set up and to tweak my paper for the last time.

In my dream an old friend, who is now dead, LB was the conference convenor. LB once lectured me in psychology. He was born around the same time as my father.

People had already arrived in time for the third day of the conference to begin. They sat in rows faces turned towards the front in readiness. LB asked me to start. Some people were still rustling papers and chatting to one another, so I had to repeat my first sentence. Then I started fumbling my words. I lost my place on the page and could not find it for what seemed like ages. People shifted in their seats and began to talk among one another. I could not regain their attention. I tried from the beginning and spoke loudly but my words would not flow.

I had rehearsed and rehearsed. I had tried hard. Now here it was: my turn to present, my turn at last, last speaker of the conference, and I could not get the audience to listen.

I tried to catch LB’s eye, to plead with him to get the audience to settle, but he would not look at me. The people in the audience then seemed to lose patience altogether and before I knew it they had decided to break for morning tea.

I had lost my opportunity to present. It had passed without my saying a word of what I needed to say. I was devastated and stood at the podium in tears. There was a small group of people nearby, the ones with whom I had shared a car en route to the conference. They ignored me, too. I was furious, but flooded with tears.

In my dream LB had become a medical doctor not just a PhD. I wailed to a woman nearby about how unfair he had been in not insisting to the audience that I be allowed to have my turn. I had tried so hard to prepare and now no one wanted to hear from me.

I woke sobbing and nothing felt as if it would ever be any good again.

The railway platform

His face was distorted with painful efforts to smile. ‘Don’t move’ I said to him ‘I have seen you somewhere.’

He did not speak just let out a lacerated laughter. ‘ Are you dead or alive?’ I asked and looked around in fear. The railway platform was dark and deserted, not even a single lamp was lighted. No one was around. I looked back at the form lying huddled on the rough, stained floor. ‘I am alive, but I died very long ago.’ He said in muffled tones.

The porter arrived with my bag, my red bag with blue logo. I almost grabbed the bag from his hands and tried to get up from the floor where I was sitting on my hunches, talking to the sleeping man. I could not stand up on my legs and I groped in the dark, to look for my feet. The porter shook his head in sadness and walked away. His fire engine red uniform was glowing in the dark. I saw a flash of steel badge on his sleeve. He raised his arm to stop an approaching train. The train stopped.

He turned back to beckon at me. He told me with hand and facial gestures that the train would not stop for long. I must get up and board it as fast as I can. My bag was not there. The man was still lying on the ground, and I looked around for my bag.

‘Have you seen my bag?’ I asked, as I looked around frantically. The platform was pitch dark and the train had begun to move slowly.

The porter in red uniform was running his fingers along the moving body of the train, walking leisurely, while the train chugged along. I watched him count the numbers on his other hand. One, two, three…

He was smiling.

I wanted to run and catch the train but it had left the platform. There were just long, winding lines of shining grey steel, running parallel to each other, with sharp pebbles in between. A few feet away from me, my bag was lying open on an iron bench. I saw huge bundles of paper, peeping out from the half open zip.

‘How did you open it?’ I asked the man who was still lying on the ground, his face buried in the crook of his arm. He refused to answer me and I was feeling angry with him. I wanted to shake him up but my hands and feet were just hanging by my side. The darkness grew.

‘Okay, I want to wake up now. I want to go home.’ I said to the porter in red uniform, who was silently putting all the papers back in the bag.

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

It's the future and I have am in some gray industrial zone where I've been recruited, inducted, assigned to a work force for a nuclear plant. My job is to climb a wooden scaffolding and then dive off a platform and descend through a transparent tube filled with steam down through a vat of water. I do this over and over. At some point I am looking at the diving platform apparatus from a distance and start to have a realization of why have I been assigned to this task? Then, these Sovietesque ladies in charge start questioning me about the temperature of the water in the vat. There is a panic that a nuclear fission has occurred. If the water is cold, then its a fusion reaction. The water was tepid and someone is saying this is relatively "good" indication as we are all running and panicking away from the site. We end up in a public space room in a Central Park like area and I realize that a small camera mounted on a pole (as there are all over NYC, of course) is a surveillance camera. Am filled with dread. With a group of strangers in the dark am wading through a ravine or extended buried pipe in the park which is clogged. Sense of continuous and detailed considerations with these people about whom to trust in this situation. Wake up wondering if the Iranians have disclosed about their nuclear explorations as a "cry for help," from a faction within the government.

This morning I dreamt I went to visit the house of some friends. It was an unusual house in that there was a long low movable wall around its perimeter. At several points in the wall there were gaps to take the place of doors. You could move this wall with a simple push and get the openings to fit to the door of each room in the house. It was like opening the lid of a pepper dispenser. You push the lid around and different size holes become available depending on whether you want a light sprinkling of pepper or a great handful.

My friend’s daughter was in her room. I call him my friend but he’s more my husband’s friend. I have an ambivalent relationship with my husband’s friend, but somehow my feelings about him did not feature in the dream nor my feelings about his daughter, who is a strange person I find in real life, though in the dream she seemed normal.

She had gone to a great deal of trouble to tidy her room and yet I noticed the drawers were bulging and stuff peeped out through the cracks of the wardrobes as if she had simply stuffed things inside willy-nilly. There was a false sense of order here.

My youngest daughter who in the dream was still a toddler joined us. A carefree, cheerful toddler. Then a little ball of fur on legs walked across the room. It looked innocent enough and I asked my friend’s daughter what it was.

‘Stay away from them,’ she said. ‘They’re trouble.’ The ball of fur suddenly let out a spray of the foulest stench imaginable into the room and we all reeled back.

‘That’s what they do,’ my friend’s daughter said. ‘And if they manage to get some of that stink on you, it sticks for ages.’

I swooped up my daughter and tried to escape the monstrous ball of fur, which I felt sure was getting ready to spray us again.

The doors slid around the room and my friend, my husband’s friend arrived, all bluster and swagger. He remonstrated with his daughter for keeping the walls fixed in one place. He had had trouble getting in.

I was aware as if in a flash that there were other dangers lurking here in this oddly designed house and I must be careful.

It is very early in the morning, in the hour or so before dawn. I hear Moonie meowing and scratching at the door, so I roll out of bed and go downstairs to let him in. The light is dim, yet through the glass door I can see that he is not alone: a handsome sliver-grey wolf stands nose-to-nose with him on the deck by the door. Although he doesn't appear threatened by the wolf's presence - indeed, they seem merely to be checking one another out - the thrill of seeing a wolf at my door is tempered with some concern for Moon. Careful not to make any sudden movements, I go quietly to the door and crack it open just enough to let him slip through. I look at the wolf for a moment, then open the door further, sit on the stoop and extend my hand. The wolf is wild, and I am not afraid. He licks my fingers delicately, then I begin to pet him. Everything in my house and outside looks exactly as it does in waking life, yet as I pet the wolf I begin to wonder if this is all happening in a dream. If so, I want it to continue. I awaken here in the pre-dawn light.

I had a dream once that I had a Bukowski rug on the floor, and each time I got broke, all I had to do was reach into the mouth and some money would come out of the rug—the Bukowski rug.


—Excerpt from "Charles Bukowski love letters sold, maybe more," by juston Berton, San Francisco Chronicle, Sept 18, 2009

Anne Gorrick and I were riding around in a small, slow-moving, blimp-like airplane, circling Manhattan, looking for a place to land. I was concerned about maneuvering the plane in between buildings, but Anne seemed totally confident and relaxed about it (she was the pilot). As we started to descend, it occurred to me, and so I said to her, “. . .you know, I think one is supposed to have a license to drive an airplane.” And then: “what should we say when the air traffic controllers call?”

In my dream I am traveling on a plane, which later becomes a train. While the plane is in the air someone takes it into his head to shoot a couple of the passengers. Their bodies lie inert on the floor between the rows of seats. No one seems perturbed but I over hear the plane’s captain. He is angry and wants to land as soon as possible.

The plane becomes a train. It rattles its way through the countryside and I can see the broken rocks of the mountains through which we travel.

There is a group of people on the verge of a green hill. They are dressed up in readiness for a wedding. I have not been invited to this wedding but somehow I mingle with them. It starts to rain, trickles at first then great torrents. A small group of us head for the shelter of a tree whose branches are dome shaped, as if we were standing underneath an umbrella. The rain gets so heavy eventually it soaks through the branches.

I take out my red umbrella and offer to share it with a woman whose hair is beginning to lose its pre-wedding curl. I feel sorry for her. She has gone to some trouble to prepare for this wedding and now she begins to look like a sodden dog. I offer to make room for another man underneath the canopy of the tree but there is scarcely room for the three of us.

I am inside a house now with a friend, someone who has also been invited to the wedding and a couple of her friends. They are preparing a dish to take to the wedding. I offer to help. My friend is enthusiastic about my offer but the other woman in the couple is not. She barely speaks to me as I go about offering ideas on how best to cook the lump of meat they have placed in a shallow baking dish. I take a bottle of milk from the fridge and prepare to pour it into the base of the dish. This is the best way, I say, to stop it from drying out. My friend is impressed. Her friend, the other woman, is not and says as much.

‘I’ll be off then,’ I say and flounce out. The front door slams behind me.

The two women follow. On the nature strip my friend apologises but her friend says nothing.

‘You are the rudest person I have ever met,’ I say to my friend’s friend. ‘I was only trying to help.’

I tried to close my eyes and my eyelids refused to budge. They were heavy and unmoving as if a scrap of steel is fixed over my eyeballs. The apparition was sitting across the table with a knife in one hand and a bunch of drying flowers in another.

There was a wilting, stale looking cake lying on the table, with chocolate icing that appeared to me as if brown wax has been poured over the creamy mound. The apparition smiled. My smile. It waved the knife in the air and said. ‘Let’s cut this cake.’ I saw my silver bracelet on its arm. A tiny sparkle caught the light above. The eyes were mine too. The face took a shape right before my eyes, like a swift, deft stroke of an artist’s sketch. It was me I was looking at. Sitting across me, not smiling, not seeing. Just looking. I could feel the goose pimples on my arms. A chill ran through my spine.

‘I am not you.’ I tried to scream and it came from her mouth. I watched my words flowing out from her lips. ‘I am not you’, like someone mocking me. Imitating my voice and my pitch.

I watched, frozen, as she put the drying flowers over the cake and laughed. A jagged laugh. Not mine. ‘Happy belated birthday! It took you so long that the flowers have dried. See?’ It was not my voice anymore. It sounded hollow and strained and masculine in tenor.

To my horror she began to cut the flowers instead of the cake and the wax begin to crumble around the mound, looking like shavings of wood. A slow number had begun to play from somewhere. A guitar. Emanating a jaunty pain. There were many people standing around me now, watching me and gesticulating in my direction, telling some secrets to each other in whispers.

‘I have to go. Listen, I am going.’ I said to her. This time the words came from my lips. She was not there.

I dreamed of another memorial service. This time for a powerful, wealthy woman who I did not know. Her name was Marlan and there was a lot of food involved. Now I'm wondering if she was Marlin, like a fish, which we all know is Jesus for the secret handshake. Right?

dreamed a lecture about de la soul, without any real perspective on where or who I was in relation to this. I understand only that a professor (who I wasn't) was speaking on a kind of fifties-future (world's fair style) island podium. music by de la soul that I had never heard before. he described their newest record as the greatest work of art of all time. all their record covers were iterations of what is actually the cover of the recent eponymous record by the band The Adventure, in different pairs of colors. woke up & the music was gone. took a few minutes to remember different music.

Last night there was some dream involving fashion models I believe.

I was in another house. A large house. With lots of rooms and a huge compound. There was a big hole in the ground near the entrance and a big heap of mud was surrounding that hole. The mound of damp mud looked too heavy to be moved with the small shovel and I was wondering how to get that large hole filled. Next to the mound there was another patch of ground, which was green. Lush green, surrounded with lovely fresh flowers. I was pestering my mother to go back to our old house. The house, which had an arid patch of land around it and was filled with a vast nothingness .She ignores my plea and walks to the kitchen waving a ladle in the air, saying it was getting late to cook dinner. Maybe I can help her. The kitchen was submerged in water. There was water everywhere. Even the utensils were floating in that flood. I am flailing my hands and feet, only to be sucked in deeper by the unrelenting currents that have appeared in the water lodged kitchen. I see a fading image somewhere away from the watery haze before my eyes, but am not able to scream. My breath is growing fainter, re-surfacing in unfamiliar half tones, and I keep thrashing my arms around, to reach the surface. Suddenly, the mounting storm engulfs me, and I fall on the rising surfs, sinking deep inside, but could not find my voice to call out for help. I see that a starless darkness is howling beyond the white crest of the waves, “Wait…!” I call after my mother, but I am caught by the vortex of the whirlwind. The crazy waves crash upon me, ready to break me into pieces. I am gasping for breath as I look across the shores, writhing in my helplessness. I do not see my mother anywhere. Only the tall and undulating shadows of dark waters, looming across the kitchen walls.

I wake up breathing hard, with my head on my numbed arm. My arm feels as heavy as stone, with no sensation, and no life. I let it remain, like a log beside me, waiting for it to come back to life.

I am trying to make a u-turn in my car into oncoming traffic when I notice a group of people marching in parade. Somehow I mange to complete my u-turn behind these people; less a parade I see now, and more like a funeral procession.

I am on foot. I walk behind the slow moving procession. Someone holds a banner aloft to commemorate the priest who has died. The banner holds the photograph of this priest in all his finery, his image akin to those I have seen in a sepulchre atop one of the Eugenien hills in Italy. The photo of the priest presumably was taken while he was alive but in it he looks already dead.

The slow moving people in the procession have left an empty lane to one side through which those not part of the parade can pass at a normal pace. I walk with a group of strangers behind the procession. My unknown to me companions are not involved with the funeral but they seem happy enough to dawdle along behind. I break off from them and take off down the empty space.

‘I’m in a hurry,’ I call back to my unknown companions.

Then I find I am with an old boyfriend. We kiss for a long time. In between kisses he notices that the lower half of my legs are covered in long black hairs, unevenly spaced along both legs. In some places small tufts sprout. Their roots seem half dislodged around a few reddened hair follicles that have become infected. I am ashamed at the sight of them. My boyfriend says nothing. He must leave me now to go off for his therapy session, but he tells me that he does not mind being late.

‘You must not be late,’ I say to him. I offer to drive him in my car. His therapy session begins at 9 am. Just as we are about to leave another friend arrives. Now my boyfriend is my husband. This other friend then tries to talk my husband out of going to his therapy.

The alarm sounds and I wake up.

I am in my mother’s kitchen, the kitchen from my childhood, which, in the manner of dreams, is both different from how it was, and irrevocably the kitchen I knew. Here is the island unit, here the big wooden table. Here’s the rubbish bin.

The bin is over-spilling: the rubbish bag needs changing, and it leaves me with this creeping greasy feeling.

It’s so incredibly noisy in here. My mother speaks but I can’t hear a word she’s saying: it’s as if she’s been muted. I think the radio must be turned to some ungodly volume, so I turn off the radio, but I still can’t still hear my mother. Then I realise it must be the TV making all the noise, so I turn the TV off. I’m angry at my mother for having so much noise in here and expecting me to hear her, or perhaps she’s angry at me for not understanding her.

Then I am in my living room, the living room of the flat in which I live right now, though the family kitchen is still somehow next door. My laptop screen is flashing messages, and some are from my boyfriend, and some are from an editor. And the editor is typing in caps and says ‘ADDRESS!!’ And I think well, okay, she needs it for sending me a copy of her publication, though I didn’t know this was going to be a print thing, but this is a bit rude and unprofessional, and just weird, and why is she messaging me on gchat? And she says ‘HON, ADDRESS!’ and she just keeps messaging, like she’s drunk or ADD. And I get confused between the messages from her and the ones from my boyfriend.

And the kitchen’s still so noisy, and my sister’s trying to tell me something, and I wake confused and irritated, but I know I must have managed to hear something my mother said because I'm left with this lingering memory of her voice.

My husband and I are working as border guards for people who try to enter via the coast at the topmost end of Australia. It’s hot and dry, yellow scrub everywhere, and in the middle of a dirt patch we stand at a flat table covered with documents.

In time my husband goes off to a different section and leaves me in charge overnight. He rings on the telephone at one point and asks me to arrange a sign that we can hang from a tree. The sign must read:

‘All visitors, please shake hands with the official party as you enter the coastline.

I see a family arrive at one stage. The woman/mother of the group holds back from crossing the border, a thin strip of land between the ocean and the shore. The others race ahead. They want to come here; she does not. They skip across easily while she is not looking and then once alone she has no choice but to follow.

My daughter helps me with the sign. She sticky tapes together two sheets of A4 and pins them to the tree.

When my husband finally returns in the morning he tells me he had trouble sleeping. It was so hot outside. But I, on the other hand, slept like a baby.

At the beginning of this dream I was getting food in a fast-food restaurant. It is unclear (and unimportant) which one. Its location is also unknown, but it must have been in my hometown because when I came out to my car I drove just a short distance before I arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house. My sister was with me as I pulled up to the front door and parked. The porch had markings on the concrete floor indicating a parking space for a bicycle. It also contained the universal symbol for handicapped persons. As my sister exited the car I handed her a long note that had been given to me by a young girl at the restaurant. She had handed it to me with the explanation that it was for my sister and had been written by her mother, who was seated at a nearby table. The woman had waved to me and I had said hello to her.

Next, the dream shifted locales abruptly. I was now at the showing of a movie with both my mother and my sister. The theater was an old car dealership building on the highway in the center of Highland, NY. The screen was small - not much larger than a large screen tv, and was in the front corner of the room we were in. Most of the wall of that room was the large plate glass window of the showroom. Approaching from the northeast was a storm. The wind and rain was intensifying by the minute, but in its wake the skies were clearing. During a lull in the action onscreen my sister asked me what time my appointment was. Apparently I had a meeting of some kind to attend. The storm grew more intense and the sky darkened considerably. The plate glass window began to crack and everyone in the audience moved to the rear of the room to avoid any flying glass should it shatter. Finally, the glass did break and someone shouted that a tornado was approaching. We could see it through the broken window. We heard the distinctive roar and panic set in. The cyclone was headed straight toward us. The audience scattered through two doors in the rear of the room and ran in all directions. I lost track of the whereabouts of my mother and sister as I headed north along the rear of the building. There were heavy curtains or drapes hanging all around me as I continued to make my way along the outside wall. I made my way past other buildings along the edge of a steep incline behind them. Every so often I would part the curtains to check on the status of the tornado. During one such look I watched a building shatter and be torn apart. I kept moving until the funnel cloud had passed and begun to dissipate. As I made my way back toward the road to see the devastation and begin my search for my mom and sister someone approached me and said that there was someone nearby from up near Kingston. He had earlier heard me exclaim that the storm seemed to be dissipating to the north where I was from. At this point I awoke and the dream was over. I never did find my missing sister or mother.

...three uncles dead in car-crash I'm in a warehouse & responsible for cutting up their bodies for burial....takes me an hour to cut one piece into tiny pieces, a rack of lamb like a hand....warehouse like something from a Mafia movie where drug deals go bad....

This is so slow, I'm inexperienced & crying now....must confess to the two undertakers, I -- I'm Donnie Brasco? -- can't ever get this done in time for the funerals. They'll do it, but how can I find the money, when I'm sure it will cost at least $5,000 for each body.

Walking in dreams I sometimes
looking over my shoulder shouting empathy
across the sea, the surf subtles sparsely
across suggestions of “Have I been here already?
Is that already happening?” before
awake alert I glance sidelong only to find her hanging along.

A wordless progression
of images and photographs


pick up a leaf
reveal a face
hidden beneath

see the sky
a stream

a fern
a cloud

reach inside

surprised
to find

my hand again

I had a weird dream that I met Sylvia Plath in some underground cave of water and she was showing me how to get to some land.

The Dream-weeping willows

The yellow car stopped at the entrance of my house and someone opened the passenger’s door without stepping out. I saw the glimpse of a brown hand, spotless edge of a white sleeve and gold cufflinks with insignia of dragons embossed on it. I waved a goodbye to them and with joyful strides set out towards the waiting car. My haversack felt empty as I laid it on the back seat. Hollowed and pulpy, as if I have dropped everything on the way. I pressed on the black leather in panic and heard a whoosh of air escaping from the half open zipper. He smiled at me and said nothing.

I looked back at them, for one last glimpse and final wave, but there was no house, no door. I saw a row of weeping willows, yellowing in the autumn sun. Beyond that was a mossy, black wall and they were sitting on it. Laughing, jeering faces. Their lips made a perfect ‘O’ and they waved their arms at me wildly, in unison. Go…just go!

The road ahead was wet and gray, undulating like a writhing, black snake. The walls at both side of the road was broken down and painted with a parched yellow color. Suddenly it rose, higher and higher as the car sped on the empty road.

‘Will we reach on time?’ I asked his rigid profile.

‘We will reach.’ His voice was ricocheting against the whirr of the engine. I tried to hold on to the edges of my seat but there was water everywhere. No safety belt, just water. Rippling, raging, rising waves and my hands just scoured at the angry bubbles without holding on to anything. The sharp and cold currents were gnawing at my fingers and I found my side of the car caving slowly into a sidewalk quagmire.

I looked at him and he was still looking ahead. Moving the steering wheel furiously, with one hand. ‘Stop.’ I said but I didn’t hear my voice. I said it again but the sound did not come out. My lips moved, gasping for air, like the mouth of a fish left out on the dry shingles. No sound came out still. I reached over to shake him, pull out the key from ignition, but he was not there. The seat was empty. The car had stopped and it was sinking into the squishy ground at my side. I opened the door of the car and swam through the yellow waters of a muddy river. The sun was beating down, scorching my skin, as I looked up at the dry vacant sky. The yellowing walls at the side of the road were turning into willows again, and I ran on the hot, dry tarmac. My feet were hurting as it hit the concrete surface. He was chasing me now. His gold cufflinks glinting in the sharp sunrays as he waved at me to stop.

I ran and ran and getting inside a bathroom locked myself in. the bathroom was freshly painted in bright pink color and a white plastic bucket was put upside down on the floor. He was sitting on the bucket removing his cuff links.

‘I can’t seem to get rid of these.’ He spoke to me and I nodded.

In the corner of a yard I didn’t recognize, my father was raking leaves by a wooden fence. The leaves were old and rotten and piled deep. There was a small tree trunk nearby that I thought should be removed. I told my son it would be easy to dig out. But when we walked around it, the other side was massive. I said, “What happened? This tree looks like it’s 300 years old.” Two words, then, died on my lips: “petrified” and “sycamore.” My father, meanwhile, had found another area under some bushes that needed raking. I could tell by his movements that he was angry about something. He quickly finished the area and went to the front yard. We followed him. The sun was up in the backyard, but in the front it was still mostly dark. My father disappeared behind some bushes near the foundation. Again, he started raking. A neat row of leaves appeared on the lawn. Then, silence. My father was gone.

I dreamed I had traveled overseas for the next International Autobiographical and Biographical Association conference (IABA). I was on a bus traveling to my hotel in Morocco, where the conference was to be held. I travelled with my friend, Christina. When the conductor came to us I had no money for my ticket and needed to borrow a pound from her. Christina was gracious in lending her money but I felt dreadful (she could ill afford it) and I determined that I should not forget to repay her.

Next I am in a queue of people led by the conference organiser, Margaretta Jolly. She has a clipboard under her arm and seems officious as we weave our way through long corridors in the Moroccan university (which looks for all the world like any university I have even been inside in Australia – the same dull grey office chairs and desks) en route to the conference room. So far I do not recognise a soul and I feel sadly out of place.

We reach a sort of dead end in the form of a large room with windows. The only way out beyond the door through which we came is through the windows. Margaretta makes her way through one of them with a couple of others but a university caretaker stops the rest of us. We must not travel through university windows this way, he says. In order to get to the conference room we must backtrack part way along from where we have come and then turn down another corridor.

Eventually we reach the room, three quarters full of people already. For a while I sit down with Millie M and her husband. I am surprised to see them here. This is an IABA conference, not a psychotherapy one. We chat. Millie is eating from a plate piled high with what I imagine to be Moroccan food, couscous, and some sort of exotic dips, fruits and nuts. She is friendly but I sense an awkwardness, whether in her or me, and I am glad to get away.

I sit beside a woman whom I have never seen before. She does not wear a nametag. Nor do I, I realise, and wonder whether it would not in fact be helpful for all of us to wear such tags. The woman introduces herself. She spells out her name, which she says so quickly that I cannot catch on to the letters: L.E.U… or some such thing.

‘I am a professional atheist,’ the woman says. She has a look on her face as if she expects me to be impressed by these words, whether positively or negatively. She has said this to people before and clearly gets a reaction every time.

I am impressed, but before I can say more the conference begins. Margaretta starts off a discussion about autobiography and various people speak. When it comes to my turn I respond to the story of the woman who spoke before me. She had been telling the audience about how she had spent her last two years of school in a Catholic convent as a boarder. She had won a scholarship. Somehow her story seemed to be packed into a box of Vita Brits. I could see the half packed box on the stage in front of me. I started to speak about my own reservations about priests.

‘I do not like priests, ‘I said, no longer confident. I realised as soon as I had said this that my audience disapproved – furrowed brows, cross faces. There were priests in the audience perhaps. I had spoken out of turn. I tried as hard as I could to backtrack.

‘It’s not the people I dislike,’ I said. ‘It’s the position.’

But it was too late. I rattled on then about something to do with my own childhood when someone sitting nearby called out to me,

‘What’s your point?’ I tried desperately to find one, to bring my comment back to the story of the previous speaker, and to wind up my words. The conversation went on then with other people taking their turns to speak. I looked around the room indignant. I wanted to go home, to leave this large group. I felt such a failure. This is an IABA conference but none of these people are autobiographers. They are historians and people from memory studies, literary critics and the like. I am an autobiographer and they hate me for it.

The telephone rang and I woke up.

A snippet of a dream. I went to a supermarket, one of those small IGA types where the corridors are narrow and dark and some of the things high up on the shelves look as though they have been there for a long time, well past their used-by dates.

I was looking in the toothpaste section for a substance I could use on my gums. My fifteen-year-old daughter who wears braces on her teeth uses something like this whenever her braces are adjusted to stop the freshly realigned wires from digging into the sides of her cheeks. I was delighted when I found the stuff in a form I had not seen before –cylindrical sticks of what appeared to be a clear resin like substance. They reminded me of the glue sticks my children use in their glue guns.

I selected the largest pack, which contained about eight sticks and made my way to the register. There were already two women there, one of whom kept leaving her place at the counter and rushing back into the corridors in search of more groceries. The cashier had decided to serve her first, which seemed unfair to me because I sensed the other woman had been there longer and besides the first woman was holding everything up.

The second woman, waiting her turn, exuded that anxiety I often feel when I rush through the shopping. She said nothing but I could feel it in her body language. She was in a hurry. Impatience poured from her pores but if the cashier registered this she did nothing about it. I felt relieved that for once I was not in a hurry.

My memory of the dream peters out here and I am left with a vague sense that it took forever for the two women to be served. I had entered the supermarket in daylight, by the time I walked out night had descended.

Last night I dreamed:

There's a devil statue in my attic. A man approached me and offered his help to get rid of it, but I had to be careful because the devil statue could hear everything I said. Then I became suspicious that maybe the man was trying to trick me to get close to the statue. 3 people I know (1 poet/writer, a past co-worker of mine and one of Chris') were trying to build a machine to wake up the devil statue. I tried to stop them. I tried to hide parts they were using to build the machine. But it was no use. They were gonna wake up the devil.

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

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

I had a dream that I was in Paris and carrying the book around. I went into J Crew (yes, in Paris) and gave them my credit card - I think you had to get a credit card to get in there. My card was bad, so they said, 'we'll have to take your book away.' I FREAKED out and ran out of the store. It was raining and my book got wet. This is the third dream 'in which I was a poet' in two weeks. I also dreamt that Eileen Myles was my boss at the Department of Education and that I was trying to write a poem like Mei Mei Berssenbrugge writes a poem - with collage pieces all over the table.

I don’t know why, but every few weeks or months, I dream that I’ve either forgotten to prune the vines and trees on our old family farm, or that it’s late in the season and I’ve fallen far behind. It happened again last night. First I thought I’d better prune the vines by the road so the place wouldn’t look like it had been abandoned. Then I remembered the apricots, and the next thing I knew, I was near the top of a ladder putting the finishing touches on a tree with a pair of long-handled shears. When I climbed back down, it was summer and I was in a park, trying to figure out how to prune the various trees and shrubs growing alongside a quiet residential street. Someone I couldn’t see said, “Maybe you should ask the doctor.” And I said, “What would the doctor know about pruning shrubs?” Then there arose the scent of dampness and mold, and I said, “Soon I will find the graves.”

I woke from this dream in the middle of the night and I thought I must write it down now, but I could not bear to revive the dream through the writing. I wanted to get back to sleep and escape the images that would not leave my mind.

We were in a room, a group of us. I was there with my daughters. We had been kidnapped at knifepoint. One had been taken aside. Our captors had chopped off her hands and feet and trussed her into a white shroud. She lay there like an amputated mummy, alive still, but silent. In the dream I noticed that there was no blood seeping from her open wounds and I wondered about her pain.

Two of our captors, the leaders, decided to leave us in the care of the others. They went off in search of food and slammed the door behind them. They had been careless. They left a rifle stretched out along a table. It reminded me of all the rifles I have seen in television movies since I was a child.

I knew what to do. Grab the rifle and point it outwards. Pull the trigger.

By the time I had it in my hands and had shoved it in the direction of one of my captors the trigger had gone off. The one in my sights did a sort of jog before landing on her feet. Somehow I had missed.

In a split second I had them all there at my attention. My captors were now my prisoners but in that same split second I realised there were no more bullets left in my rifle.

Did they know this? They seemed uncertain. They hesitated. They slunk back into their chairs.

I called to my off-sider, my daughter, to get hold of their guns. My off-sider, my baby daughter gathered them as I stood, my heart racing, and wondered when and if I would be yet again put to the test.

If I fired a shot would they see that I had no bullets left in my rifle, or was I mistaken? There were bullets: One tug on the trigger, followed by a loud blast, blood all over the walls and murder on my hands.

I am in a brightly lit white room with a few other people. One of them is a Gypsy man, maybe in his early 40s, who looks and feels very familiar to me - where do I know him from? First I'm speaking with someone else, but aware of his presence because he seems to be watching me. Them I'm suddenly speaking with him - how did that happen? I tell him that I, too, have Romani ancestry, through my birth father's lineage. Upon telling him this, it dawns on me that he IS one of my ancestors. A sudden glint in his eye tells me that he's aware of my recognition of who he is (as if he's been waiting for me to catch on). Now I'm aware that I'm dreaming. He holds up his right hand to give me a high five. As soon as our palms touch, he clasps my hand firmly in his, and I jolt awake.

Chris' 'healing hands' are successfully realigning people's backs. He realigns poets' backs, poets who I believe have lost their way, poets who I feel have hurt me. They all suffered serious back pain, but with a few deft adjustments, Chris fixes that. I make a joke that these poets should pay him homage--that Poet 1 should draw him as a statue with a very large penis and Poet 2 should give him a golden cow. Chris tells me he's a little tired. In addition to the poets, he also realigned 15 other people's backs during his walk on the beach this morning.

I’m expected to announce the winners of the class election and post it on the blackboard. As I try to go over the names in my mind I know I won’t remember them, but I can’t take this seriously. I have an oversize cup of coffee that’s spilling and full of grounds. Some young kids show me the sink which is huge and cumbersome. When I turn around a fight has broken out between two boys, but then I realize it’s a play fight.

This is the best time of the day for writing and yet I feel I can’t use it. I fear I can’t use it because I have that empty disinterested feel that I sometimes get when everything that comes to mind seems trivial and scarcely worth writing about. This is the blank page syndrome. I suspect there are many who when confronted with the single page might wait and wait, might fiddle with words. This happened in my dream now as I come to think of it. I was at a meeting with university types, including Klaus N. Klaus was involved in talking about history and the past. At one stage I noticed a writing friend, working at her desk alone. On a sheet of paper I saw that she had written down seemingly random words. She then played with each word in turn, words like ‘loosely’. Something about the ‘oo’ letters led on to other words containing such letters.

I wish I could remember now the sense my friend made of her words because in the dream I knew she was working to create new ideas. I tried myself later in my dream to do something similar, but my ideas seemed prosaic. Somehow I was stuck at the surface of words, their sound, and their shape. I could not fathom deeper meanings no matter how hard I tried. The emotional tone in my dream was one of sadness; the left out experience that comes from not feeling as though you belong. Desperately I wanted to belong and to impress but it was not working and I sat at my desk trying to stretch meaning out of words that would not oblige me, while the other people, engaged in conversation, walked on by.

I had a bad dream. Very gory. Some kind of murder investigation. I was in a huge barn-like structure, dark wood, wide open rooms, barn-like floors. I was maybe four stories up. It was some kind of camp. There were cots lining the walls. And in the cots were the corpses of slain people, all young, in their early 20s, brutally murdered by being stabbed or cut. So many. Horribly sad. Then we found the person who had committed the murders: a young man, also in his early 20s. Before he could be arrested he threw a large black computer keypad into a swimming pool that was now somehow in the middle of the room. Then he jumped in. He electrocuted himself.