This weekend I dreamed of an archeological dig (and deciding to homeschool Gideon so I could bring him along), speaking on who gets away with making butt thumbing threats, having to answer questions on religion when buying plane tickets, not being able to speak because my mouth is full of hard & sticky gum, separate tables, a Turkish beach vacation, pictures in my bikini from that vacation being posted on the Harriet blog, a man's sex reassignment surgery, knitting and iguanas.

For the first time in my dreaming half century underworld
there it was
a Monarch Butterfly.
yes ever flapping this first butterfly
a sight bringing me toward the surface
still i remained smiling asleep

I’m in a strange house with strange rooms oddly juxtaposed.
Doors are where they shouldn’t be; some open onto walls.
I ask the carpenter why this is so.
Muscular and old, he answers with a smile.

Now we’re outside, walking through an old industrial area.
I see trucks; workmen; the smudged rear windows of warehouses.

The carpenter is no longer a carpenter.
His work apron is gone.
Now he’s a madman with twinkling eyes.

Who knows what he knows.

My grandmother’s uncle was upset that no one recognized him. I touched him gently, affectionately, on the side of his face. His angry expression melted away. He closed his eyes. When he opened them he was still very old, but he was himself again.

I dreamed that some woman was combing my hair, digging the comb into my scalp. It hurt, and hair was being yanked out in huge clumps.

Running down a gentle slope scattered with old dry oaks, dodging circular bolts of lighting thrown by someone whose smile tells me he’s just having fun. The one aimed at my head wakes me up.

Last night I dreamed I was in Italy sitting around a table with a group of Australian friends, all of whom we had met by chance in the streets of Italy or at the beach.
‘You can almost guarantee running into someone you know,’ I heard one woman say to her companion.
‘It’s ridiculous to travel so far away and there they are, all your friends. May as well not leave home at all.’

I sat opposite old friends, Dianna and Roger. I had not seen them for years. In the dream they appeared just as they were when I knew them best over twenty years ago. Roger was still darkhaired and sprightly, Dianna, a couple of years older, still trim and fit. Dianna was nursing their daughter, who is now in her mid twenties, but in my dream Ingrid was still a small child of less than two. Dianna was stroking her cheek. There were other old friends and acquaintances, mostly those we had met through our years of contact with Chris and Suzie.

Earlier at another dinner in my dream Chris and Suzie and their two children were sitting at a table with Suzy’s elderly father. I knew that Suzie needed to help her father regularly to the toilet.

I was not happy to be there. They seemed such a wowserish family. Here we were in Italy and they were not even drinking wine with their meal. They were all on water, which is uncharacteristic of Chris.

Their daughter poured Bill and I a glass of wine from a Chianti bottle. Even though I was grateful for the wine I was annoyed that she had not at least asked whether we preferred wine or water. I did not like her making the choice for me.

I had with me a gold embossed Easter egg that opened up into some sort of container. In it I had stored my partial denture and some play dough from among Leo’s toys. Suzie took it from me curious about the shape of the egg. Her father then took it from her and before I knew it he had opened the egg and its contents went missing. I was furious. How could I sit at this table a front tooth missing and still have conversation? I wanted to leave.

We queued up for food at a huge bain-marie and again Chris and Suzie’s daughter poured Bill and I another glass of wine, while the others stayed on the water. Then Bill and I were roaming through the streets of Italy. Somehow Bill had managed to take his leave, even before the main course had been served and although I was glad to be away from them, I felt guilty to have not stayed at least till the end of the meal.

dream about tornadoes (recurrent) again last night.

The Mountain Lake

My dream begins with a short afternoon hike in the Catskill Mountains - a walk, really, since I am on a wide road like path with a moderate incline. I am accompanied by a young black male who seems to be a friend, though I don’t really know who he is. As we walk we share conversation and a joint of good marijuana, becoming quite high and happy. Eventually we reach a lookout point that provides a nice view of the surrounding mountains. At this point my friend seems to vanish and is replaced by several other people who I apparently know. I tell them about the rest of the trail to the top of the mountain we’re on and we agree to return the following day for the complete hike, arranging for an early start. Another short walk brings us to a small mountain lake surrounded by grassy lawns and picnic tables. I remark to the people I’m with that the water is quite cold and deep. As I walk along the shoreline I stumble and fall into the lake and begin to sink rapidly toward the bottom. I am suddenly aware that I have objects in both of my hands - a rock sculpture of some sort in one and my father’s old boy scout bugle in the other. I am reluctant to release the bugle, but realize that I must or I will drown. As soon as I resurface after releasing these objects I yell “Shit!” and start swimming toward shore, for I am suddenly in the middle of the lake. It is at this point that I realize that the people who are with me have changed. Gone are those who have accompanied me on my walk. They have been replaced by my cousin, his wife, and their teenaged son. All three have jumped into the lake to save me, but are now swimming along beside me. My cousin finds a shallow spot - a submerged rock shelf, and stands up as the rest of us continue to swim. I am not looking where I am going and bump into a young woman on an inflatable rubber raft. All around us are lily pads. The dream concludes as I approach the shore. A troop of girl scouts are having a picnic nearby and are unaware of what has been happening.

climb old concrete tower with a
railing across the top between ascent
& descent but there's no stairs for
descent -- vertigo

at my house one afternoon, W has
returned from a trip -- I ask his son
for news -- I'm playing a small digital
piano -- a small dog belonging to a visitor
snaps at me -- I put my forearm into
its mouth and it quietens down comes
& sits on the bar

looking out the window -- a big
black ape-like creature whose mouth
is a mushroom I am afraid of it &
hope it can't get in the house

in a bedroom a very young Jason
is sitting in a corner eating a sandwich
-- he throws up -- & then wants to go on eating his sandwich --
I try to persuade
him not to

My dreams last night came in snatches.

Ella, my daughter was a small child, not herself as I know her, but in the form of Benjamin from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a wizened up aged child. She lived in her room upstairs alone. I say she but she had an androgynous quality as if neither male nor female, neither old nor young, and she was lonely. I had managed to find her a puppy with whom she could play but for some reason this puppy did not stay and again my Benjamin Ella character was sad and lonely.

I was travelling in some foreign land with my husband and another of my daughters. My husband raced ahead as he often does and we were left to pull on our own resources without a map. We spent time in a large department store. I did not want to buy anything, only to look. Somehow the trip had gone wrong and I was bored. And worried about how we might spend the rest of our time.

My dreams merged here and I was back with Ella Benjamin. An old woman, proprietor of a large shopping centre, had said that Ella Benjamin could look after her puppy as she herself did not have time to manage it. Ella Benjamin was delighted.

One day later the woman came to visit. Ella Benjamin and the puppy were playing in the mad crazy manic way that puppies do, rolling and tumbling over one another. The puppy snapped at Ella Benjamin’s hands. The woman was horrified at the sight of this and slapped them both, forcing them apart.

‘He’s only a puppy,’ I said.

‘He needs discipline’, she said.

I woke up.

. . . dreamed that I called myself "Luke" after receiving a distress message from the princess on Obi Wan's TV. There was no time to waste. They were going to use the drug on her in the morning. Obi Wan agreed to help. First we stopped at a pharmacy to speak to a Hippowoman who knew of the place where the princess was being held. The Hippowoman delivered drugs to this zoo/military space facility. We had to be careful, her bosses were watching. Then Obi Wan and I spoke with the family of someone I went to high school with. I introduced myself as Luke but later in the conversation after they told me about the dead baby I admitted that I was known to them as Rebecca. But I didn't feel comfortable telling them about why I was now "Luke" or my mission. It seemed too weird to share, just like earlier in that dream when I crossed the street wearing a bikini and high boots. So goofy and exposed, no good explanation. I had trouble keeping it together after I learned of the baby. "They'll just have to try again" the mother said. It didn't seem that easy to me.

Two disjointed dream fragments:

1) A handsome woman with long black hair streaked with gray and tied back stands before a wash basin. She kneads a garment in the water, then gathers it up in her hands and holds it high above her head, wringing it out. The water cascades into the basin as she intones "ay de mi - los dolores son hechos de manchas..."

2) A woman is seated on a low, three-legged wooden stool, surrounded by 6 other women in an asymmetrical grouping, variously kneeling in front of and beside, and standing behind her. They are in a darkened room, and eerily illuminated from an unseen source. The scene looks theatrical, though it's not theater, and I'm simply witnessing rather than participating. The woman on the stool sings a lament, and the others join in the chorus. It is plaintive and beautiful. I don't remember the words - it might have been in another language.

Just a few nights ago, I had one of these reoccuring dreams where I’m chased by the authorities. What my alleged crime was, I have no idea. Late in the dream, I seek cover in a queen-sized bed that’s set right in the middle of the street. Actually, there’s two of us, but what happens between the sheets, let’s not go there. Anyway, the pressure becomes almost unbearable, until suddenly, I find the perfect escape. Call it poetic justice, or not, but I know I can get rid of my pursuers just like that–by waking up.

I had a dream that I had no ceiling. Above my bathroom there was nothing -- no plaster, no wood, no moulding, no tile. It was rotted. It was a black puddle above my shower. I was worried that other people would think it was gross.

I have a dream where I am with my family when suddenly, the ground begins to shake and rumble. We all start running. There is an alien invasion, and the aliens are these huge, metal spheres that roll over the Earth and destroy whatever is in their path. They don't exactly chase humans, but they do roll through more populated areas. My family runs and runs and runs. We head towards the coastal cliffs. We run through scaffolding of the side of the cliff, that presumably the aliens would not attack. We keep going, the thing rolls by and keeps rolling.

We meet up with some other people and go into this beautiful, coastal house with our community. Under the house, the group has built an extensive network of underground tunnels, with windows that open up in the cliff so that we can get light. You might not even know you're underground. We wait in the house until we hear that distant rumbling, and then run downstairs to the underground portion. The thing rolls over the house, destroying it, but we are all safe underground.

There is no way we can figure out to destroy the things yet, as they are extremely tough, metal spheres and we Earthlings don't know their weakness yet--but there is always a weakness.

We start hanging out in the beautiful underground house.

Last night I dreamt that it all made sense. Everything I did and said that night that I am now so ashamed of took on ordinary, understandable meanings. My words became innocent and well all laughed.

And then I came up with the idea for Fear Factor.

I dreamed I was on my way to school. Chris called to tell me that it was going to rain and I should change my pants. I told him to forget it, I was already late for school. I was late for homeroom, I considered going straight to my first period, but knew if I did that I'd be marked absent. On the stairs there were some handicapped students being helped up the stairs, they were moving slowly, so I went down the hall to take another set to my homeroom on the third floor. On the second floor I walked past an office. Inside was Joe Biden dressed as a judge.

The next dream was about Rebecca Loudon's 3 cats. A dominant male was beating on Paris the Genius cat. I told somebody to open the closet and make sure she wasn't trapped inside. It turns out, she had been.

I dream this some time ago. I dream that I have a bike, it's blue, it's a good quality bike, and it's too tall for me.

It's mine though. I ride it around campus. I'm free on my bike, and I'm empowered.

I lock the bike up--I attach it to one of the bike racks on one of the streets that border the quads.

I want to tell you that I've ridden my bike that's too big for me--that I ride it all the time--because I know you'd be proud of me that I've finally learned how to ride a bike. I'm proud of me.

But in the dream, as in life, we aren't talking.

I don't have the key to unlock the bike from the rack. And a part of it gets stolen.

I'm too small for the bike anyway.

I have moved into my new home in Ottawa. The house is huge, with interiors defined by flat, glaring white surfaces. Every room is tinged with a cold, clinical blue. The house exudes loneliness. I move through hallways and a bedroom and see two sets of sliding closets, unimaginatively placed parallel to each other.

I move to other parts of the house and see that it belongs to O's family; I’m their guest. The knowledge doesn’t lift my spirits—they’re not my favorite people. With the knowledge that this giant house is for a family of four, the spaces seem bigger than ever. I walk down a wide, white hallway to peer into O’s room. The king-sized bed is rumpled with toys and possessions tossed about. Objects—too much material wealth—litter the floor.

In another part of the house I see her younger brother. Small and nerdy, sporting oversized glasses with brightly colored rims—the trendy kind—he sits before a super-sized computer, eyes fixed on the screen. One hand deftly navigating the mouse, a vapid smile on his face, he is learning Chinese. As the words scroll by, he selects the characters he needs extra help with remembering, or that are otherwise important. The computer talks to him as he engages in this expedited process of learning. I see an unfair advantage at work.

I move to a workshop or display center, where Uncle L shows off the fancy centerpieces he has made. This is his hobby. Although he thinks of these items as high art, they actually look just like the expensive, pointless home décor sold in bourgeois chain stores such as Pottery Barn. As a form of appreciation for my looking at his art, he presents one of the centerpieces to me as a gift. It is one of the more boring-colored of the pieces. He could have at least given me a brightly-colored one.

Last night I dreamt that I was a virgin princess, and I was captured by three gods: the dragon, the dirt, and the dark. The dragon, the dirt, and the emptiness. The dragon, the emptiness and the grave. They were in competition with each other over me—it was a game for them, who could keep me, who could capture me from the one who had kept me. I flew on the back of the dragon, red scales and muscles flexing under me, until the emptiness pulled me away. The emptiness flaunted me until the dragon swooped in and took me back. Back and forth, back and forth, each taunting the other with his prize, just wanting the game to continue. And then we were in some building and I don’t remember who had me, but the dirt snuck in and the dirt grabbed me and pulled me along behind him down the stairwell, down and down and the dragon couldn’t follow and the emptiness was left behind, down and down until we were in a dirt basement, and I could not get back up and there was water running down the walls and there were rats and crawling things and the dirt did not even pay attention to me there, just tossed me to the floor and I cried and I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to get out. And somehow I managed to send a message to the dragon and the emptiness, to let them know where I was, so they could come and save me. And somehow I managed to get out and they took me again.

And I realized, I am in love with the emptiness and the dragon. I love their game. I love riding through the sky on the dragon’s back. I love the feeling of the emptiness enclosing me. I am in love with them. I do not want the dirt. I do not want the grave.

Except, later on the grave decides to woo me. He whispers look at this bed I have laid for you, and the other two will never notice and just come with me for a little while. And I am cautious; I don’t trust him, but I think that after just a little while, I will go back. And so I say yes. Take me away with you. Yes.

The dream I had last night must have been detailed, but I only remember one moment, and that’s the part right before I woke up. I don’t remember where I was, and I don’t remember if I was even myself, but whoever was conscious in the dream pointed out a very large, caterpillar-looking insect. It was about five inches long with furry spikes along its back, and I believe it was white. The last few moments of my dream involved this caterpillar finding another insect and killing it, taking it in its jaws and crushing it. A voice in my head said, “Why does he do that?”

There was a terrible apocalypse that made everyone's money sticky and no one could get their money out of the ATMs anymore. It had something to do with an anarchic, communal effort to pour maple syrup into the machines. Since apocalypses require one to make quick decisions, I had to make a split second choice about whether I wanted to spend the rest of my life indoors (in a building like the art deco American Airlines hangar at La Guardia Airport, the building with that beautiful font) or outdoors. I couldn't find Peter, so I had to make a choice that I thought he'd make so we could find each other. I choose the "indoor" option, and when I moved indoors, I could see his face pressed up against the other side of the glass. I made the wrong choice. So I begged and begged the "indoor" leaders to let Peter join us indoors, and they gave in to me. But when I ran up to meet him, I realized it wasn't Peter. It was someone impersonating my husband to get indoors and that again, I fucked up.

Last night I dreamed that I returned to high school after a mysterious absence. In the cafeteria a bully girl sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She wouldn't. So I picked her up and slammed her against another table. I held her down and dared her to free herself. She couldn't. She told me that I was "insanely strong" and I added that I was very angry too.

I dreamt that Ron Silliman had ended one of his blog posts with the words, "My weird."

My first night back home I dreamed the following things: funny-shaped pills, driving to many cities, a cheer/dance routine performed to a poem, a poet complaining about his sex life, a party, a mall, looking for a toilet in a salon and senseless murder.

I had a pleasant dream about Bill Luoma last night. Bill was going through my pile of books to get rid of, asking about the poems I planned to read last night. He had really good recall of poems of mine that were similar to but (in my mind) not as good as the poems I had intended to read. In my dream, I gave him the logic book that I have not yet given him in real life (Naive Causal Modeling, volume 1), and I talked to him about the advantages of backwards causation (part of the book argues the possibility of backwards causation, i.e. the idea that things I do today might have caused past events). I argued that backwards causation might enable Bill to change elements of his past life if he wanted to, by triggering backwards causation with his actions today, but Bill thought any past events he might be causing today had already happened and thus were unchangeable. But I said that meant that the effects would be determining the cause which is impossible. . .

In my dream Bill was using a baseball bat like a walking stick and spent a lot of time pausing to think. When he did speak I often felt surprised by what he said, and I had to think about how to respond to it. I guess this is my impression of Bill: soft-spoken, casual (not causal!) in affect, but deep, as if when you say something to Bill it takes a long time to float down through his attention, but when it's fully registered he comes back with an incisive but very light response. I'm always interested in conversation dreams which show me my internal models of other people, which are mostly about a mixture of gesture, timing, and tone. It's interesting to think of having these simple models of other people's way of presenting in one's own head--I wonder to what extent these models get triggered when doing, for example, email?

Very complex dream last night, in which many past events of my life had happened differently/been substituted for. In general, the main difference was that I hadn’t moved to LA in Summer of 2003 (when I married Tova). Instead, as I realized while chatting with my old friend Phil Poulter, I taught at MCC in Texas (which had been vastly expanded, to the size of a university) where I was exploited during the Spring 2003 semester by being given only one class [this is a reference to how I was treated in NYC that semester at John Jay College of Criminal Justice—I was cut down to one class which damaged my economic prospects in the city] and further exploited (in the dreamlife, at dreamMCC) by being forced to edit the student newspaper for free, in return for a chance to teach more classes in the future. I kept running into my students from the 03 dream-semester, smart, affluent, mostly Asian (dreamMCC had demographics more like UCI than central Texas, and I think the students from the “dreamclass” referred to the students in my Art of Poetry class at UCI in Spring 2001—probably the single class I have most enjoyed teaching, to naturally thrilling results (I won an award!)—the sort of class that I feel like my friends with PhDs and “real” teaching jobs have the chance to teach all the time.

In the dream I had had to more or less write the student newspaper myself, with help from a handful of kids in my “dreamclass” (which was just a comp. class) and it had been short, naturally. I had been dragooned into doing it because the person whose job it was had been on leave, maybe pregnancy leave (a reference to how I filled in for a teacher on pregnancy leave in Fall 2003 at Cypress College, where I was also poorly treated [classes cancelled in summer 2004]—interesting how the referential dates revolve around Summer 2003). In the “dreampresent” the student paper was huge and done by students. It occurs to me that dream MCC represented all the community colleges (since MCC was the first one), and Phil represented all the colleague-friends from the community colleges (since he was the first and best one).

Then found myself at the Martin house conversing with Phil P and James Sherry. Alcoholic subtext, but not directly mentioned—just that kind of conversation. Someone was puking in the garden. Then found myself in New York City (Williamsburg) for John Ashbery’s wedding [?]. Everyone involved very shy of publicity. Many old southern gentlemen talking about John, comically mock-pompous orations. Teenagers recording everything with camcorders, the tapes from which were meant to be confiscated at the end of the ceremony, but some of the parents of the teenagers [poor relations!] plot to sneak out with tapes to tell to the tabloids. So, a confidential wedding and it’s unclear who the other groom and/or bride was, so also a one-man wedding. There is a lovely circle-dance of teenagers pointing camcorders as they spin. It ends with confusion, as there’s a general effort to confiscate tapes, poor relations screaming and crying as the tapes [negotiable memories] are pulled away from them. I am the poor relations of course, as much as [no, more than!] I am Ashbery. I would like to be Ashbery, which is different.

After the wedding, I start driving home but have drunk too much and lose control of my car in a small tree-lined neighborhood just north of Williamsburg [very funny—suburb with lawns where Bed-Stuy should be]. I crash the car in a yard. I get out, and find my head is bleeding. I know if the police catch me I’ll get a DUI so I decide to walk home. I have to walk with no shirt on because I’m using my shirt to collect blood from my head. I go into the backyard of a suburban house and find an outdoor pantry from which I take a bottle of water. I worry that I’ll get punished no matter what I do next, because the crashed car is evidence against me, but on the other hand if I’m sober when they see me who’s to say I was drunk when I crashed. (The answer is, the wedding guests will narc on me.) So I walk and find a small southern-style convenience station, the sort you’d find where one one-lane highway intersects another, with a Bubba type dude inside. He doesn’t care I’ve got no shirt on and a bleeding head. I ask for directions to the train but he doesn’t know shit. Then I walk out and some tourists point me to the train. It’s the train to Manhattan (where apparently I live). I find a backpack on my back, put on a shirt for the train, find my head has stopped bleeding and my vision has cleared, and off I go. It’s actually the 1/9 train (misplaced, and of course the 9 train is discontinued now).

Dream seems to reference my comments on “backward causation” on my blog yesterday, the idea of changing one’s life through a natural, unnoticed process of backwards causation where actions today cause events in the past to unfold differently until there you are in a different present—my dream runs with this [nerdy] idea of an unstable continuum.

"Why on earth are we painting the walls stark white?" This is what I'm thinking as I dip my roller in the paint and slather it on the wall before me. I'm wearing a long, cream-colored silk wraparound skirt printed with pale pastel flowers. It occurs to me that this is the wrong garb for painting, since it will probably get ruined by paint drips. There's another woman here, painting the wall adjacent to mine - a stunning, slender black woman with a large afro. We both dip and roll without saying a word. At the exact same moment, as if by design, we both set down our rollers and step back to assess our work. I'm still thinking how boring it is to paint the walls white. Suddenly the other woman shakes her head violently, and a rain of bright purple paint flies out of her hair, landing in big splotches on me, on the walls, everywhere. We look at each other and laugh.

The hand that touched my elbow was cold, and felt clammy. I turned to look back in panic. It was perhaps my startled reaction and the expression of alarm on my face which brought a sudden, amused smile upon the face of the person I found standing before me. The features of that face were like a sketch from a distant past, his right hand was covered with a white bandage…and it looked a bit dirty. I forced my mind to recollect where I had seen the face. It was like those drawings one made as children, where the trick is to keep moving the pencil chronologically on the dots till a face is formed on the paper. I stood on the sidewalk, trying to recognize that face, feeling fuzzy brained. The person, who was standing before me, kept smiling all the while, watching my confusion. Not helping, not speaking at all. Just smiling mildly. The drops of rain fell in a soft spray on him, wetting his hair and clothes, but it did not seem to bother him.

He just stood on the pavement. Smiling. Involuntarily, I extended my umbrella towards him; to save him from the rain, and to my sudden, absolute horror, I saw the face and the form disappear. It appeared as if he was dissolved in the pouring rain. I was holding out the umbrella in an empty space. Few passers by gave me vague looks and I pulled the umbrella back, feeling foolish and scared. My heart was beating hard. I could feel the pulse throbbing in my temples, inside my throat and behind my eyes. In my half awake state I saw the raindrops roll down my window pane.

A casual swim begins in calm, blue waters. First I’m alone. Then I hear others laughing and splashing. The waters expand. In the distance there’s a small rocky island. I start swimming toward the island, but then a breeze comes up and the current pulls me off course toward a cliff. At the edge of the cliff is a black road; beyond and far below is where the ocean begins. A fog settles in. I feel a sense of panic. Then it lifts and somehow I can see under it and over it, but not through it. Now the stars are out. I’m walking on the road. I hear my brother’s voice. He and his wife are in a cave with pale walls. They’re waiting for me with a small fire and a meal of bread and cheese and wild greens. Before I take any, I realize that I’m holding a key. When I look up, it’s daylight again and I’m facing a locker on a busy street corner. But before I can open the locker, I have to empty out my mother’s closet. Most of what’s in it is old and stained and doesn’t need to be saved. Then I find a familiar looking towel. I retrieve it for the locker. There’s a field of corn stubble between her closet and the street corner. While I’m crossing it, I see a young woman standing alone, her back turned toward me. She’s been crying. I don’t know who she is or why she’s unhappy. I ask her if I can help. She smiles and says it’s too late. And I think, how strange that we are standing here in a field. How beautiful and lonely and sad everything is.

The other night I dreamed that I went to a psychiatrist for an evaluation. I got my glasses out of my purse so I could see. There were a bunch of hovering objects over her desk. She told me to focus on the pickle and tell her what I saw. Is it improving or getting worse? she asked. The pickle was getting worse, it was blackening. As I contemplated the pickle, I became aware that the pickle represented the masculine.

Dream # 2:

Some of the last words I wrote before coming to this place were "with wings." With or without wings, I now find myself flying over a rugged desert landscape. Make that without wings. I look at my outstretched arms and see that they are indeed arms, not wings. Now they're stretched out to the side, now palm-to-palm in front of me, now held close to my sides. Yes, this is effortless!

Soon I lose interest in how I'm flying and focus on the rapidly changing landscape below. I swoop down low over a boulder field and wonder how it would be if all the rocks were the color of lapis. Instantly they change to a deep, luminous blue. Now I'm flying high over waterways coursing through an emerald forest, now over an ancient city.

I'm suddenly aware of the precariousness of flight. A disembodied voice says "you know, this is a dream." Out loud I say "you know, I can do this in my waking life too," and awaken here.

Dream #1:

I am reading Pedro Páramo, whether the novel or the play I'm not sure. But this much I know: there is an elusive passage that appears and disappears. Sometimes it's there, sometimes not. But it changes something about the book/play, deepens one's understanding of it if one is lucky enough, or maybe astute enough, to catch it. I'm sitting here reading the book/play intently, and Sidney is here in the room with me, sitting in his comfortable chair, waiting to see if I catch the passage. Suddenly I see it, and it's as if a light has lit up in my head. Only now, as I look up from the book in excitement to tell him, he has vanished from his chair, as readily as the passage itself and the ghostly inhabitants of Comala.

Screep, screep, screep - it's 2:11 a.m., and I'm abruptly roused out of the dream when my car alarm suddenly and mysteriously sounds outside.

dreamt that me and Ramsey Lewis were renting rooms from Linda. Linda was an eco-terrorist...her and her girlfriend would rent houses in Contra Costa County, plant forests inside the houses, watch houses be overwhelmed by trees, and mold, and spores, and leaves, caves would form, rooms would crumble, houses totally destroyed, forests began taking over the neighborhood. Ramsey Lewis and i reneged on the rent and got the hell out of there.

Klaus Neumann was in my dream last night. Structurally it was a familiar sort of dream.

I am with a group of people, one of a group, colleagues from work or university and we are planning to meet Klaus for coffee. Somehow our group breaks into smaller subgroups and I become disconnected from them. I am standing alone below a tall building with an overhanging veranda. On the veranda itself I can see one of these subgroups of people playing a game together, maybe darts or ten pin bowls.

Their laughter echoes across the courtyard and I feel left out. I want to join them but cannot figure out how to reach them. In the meantime I am aware of Klaus who is supposed to be meeting us all. I do not want to miss out on seeing him. Across the way I can see another elevated veranda on a separate building and I know that Klaus is there with one or two others. I am jealous of these people. I want to be with Klaus.

In the dream, somehow even without seeing him, I know that Klaus is busy and preoccupied. He has no time for us, least of all for me. This is what I call the structural familiarity of my dream. It frames that old sense of exclusion, of not being wanted. When I wake up, I think in my logical and adult head that it is simply because Klaus has not yet responded to my email of a few days ago. The longer he takes to reply, the more rejected and unwanted I feel. But I must not take it personally.

- dreamt I lost my entire life last night. Even my plants.

Sarah Connor broke into a corporation run by the mob. She is frantically photocopying/printing documents, information from the company that she needs. There's a young male employee with her, a slovenly, slacker-type who's cracking jokes. He does not get the seriousness of the situation. Sarah senses that the terminators are near and tells the employee they need to go. He doesn't understand what's happening so she points to the security monitor. It shows rooms full of dead employees and the mob's heavily armed security forces shooting large machine guns. The security forces are quickly mowed down.

Sarah takes the employee to another room, perhaps a safer one, and continues to print out the documents that she needs.

Spot fires burst out in different sections of the kitchen, and from within the body of the radio which reports details of fires elsewhere, I can see the flames lick up the sounds. I use a hose to quench the fires but no sooner have I stopped one than another erupts.

Everywhere it is hot. A piece of metal on the ground is molten. I pick it up with tongs and toss it into a bucket of cold water. I do not realise at first that there is a crayfish living in this water. The heat of the metal causes the water in the bucket to boil. I hear the crayfish scream as it is cooked alive. Guilt as red and hot as the flames sears through me but I cannot pay it any attention. I pull the cray out of the water, thinking we can eat it later, that way at least it will not be wasted, but the RSPCA will be critical of me.

Tania, our old nanny, is desperate for a fruity bread roll, similar to the one I have put aside for later. I go to the shops to buy one for her, but they are sold out. Substitutes will not do. They are not as tasty, but I buy one anyway thinking I will give the one at home to Tania and eat the other myself. It should be okay toasted.

Everywhere outside en route to the shops are signs of devastation. I am fearful of the next fiery outburst.

In my hands, a framed sepia photograph of a crowded street in Mexico. Most of the men are wearing large straw hats, no two of which are alike. The picture comes to life: the hats, but not the faces or clothing, are infused with color; there is conversation, laughter, movement; the sound of a woman’s voice becomes the scent of gardenia.

End of the world dream. In NYC. Mass panic & confusion. A huge building with a four-story balcony inside, lots of people, elevators. Nobody knows where to go or what to do.

Somehow I get home. An SUV-sized (and shaped) bomb lands on the front lawn, but does not detonate. Then a missile the size of a fire extinguisher crashes through the window. Sensation & look of thousands of tiny stinging tick-sized black ants all over me.

Then I’m somewhere underneath the Tappan Zee bridge, at water level, debris everywhere. Manhattan side is frozen. A Tsunami-sized wave comes in from the west side of the Hudson. As it crashes in, I think about my son, who can’t swim. Intolerable sadness. I give in to the idea of dying, and am almost relieved.

I am -- as a matter of fact -- in the throes of publishing my book 'Poussin's Humour'. The book already has an author's preface. However, in the dream -- and none of the following is fact -- two prefaces have now to be included, one each by two men, who have information about the long frustrating history of the project that leads to the book. The book is now swelling until it becomes a novel (of sorts), with my original manuscript in the middle of these various accounts. I have agreed to this gladly.

One preface is already written, the other, by a man who has just won Lotto, has run into difficulties. I have to talk to my co-author urgently about the difficulties. After a long search I locate him. He is sitting under a low wooden overhang outside a building. He tells me he cannot talk to me now, he has to look after a partly incapacitated adolescent for some time yet. He agrees to meet me after 2 pm.

I start to go up the hill -- it's about half a mile -- because I have to teach until 2 pm. I take a different route from usual. I set out at a speed but soon realise I will have to slow down, if I'm to reach the top. On the way I meet a man who used to be one of my students nearly thirty years ago. His hair is grey and he is smartly dressed, a lawyer perhaps. He goes into a building on the right of the street and I go with him. We meet someone coming out who tells us this is the Fine Science building, in the same way that we talk about Fine Arts. My former student begins to tell me how his generation's drugs of choice were not marijuana, but pharmaceuticals easily available either off the shelf or by theft. That must have been 1980, or maybe 1979, I suggest, thinking of the sociology and the history of student drug-taking, and he confirms that suggestion.

reading a pad with writing by an unnamed man, middle-aged or older, bearded,

a painter, Italian. It's in English. Word, Phrase. Two words, maybe. A few words

on each line ..... 'barefoot' ..... something sad, something else said. Again ...'barefoot'.

It's a video image. His bearded face and half length, above an advertising hoarding

with red edge & yellow panel ...... 'no erectile tissue' ..... His hands out of sight behind

the hoarding, moving. He invites five women to write on a white page. There are

five # 4 sable brushes in a water-pot. Unasked, I write a page with one of the brushes,

mixing some colour with a lot of white. This is how I must write, as he had.

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

I’m sitting at a table beside my father’s uncle, Archie, who died in 1985. We each have a full mug of coffee that’s much too hot to drink. My mug is the heavy glass one I usually use for tea. His is the shiny black one a friend gave me a few years ago. We switch mugs. Now the coffee is much cooler. We switch back. Hot again. I say, “It looks like someone is trying to tell us something.” Archie smiles. Obviously, that someone is him.

Night after night for months now I've had a variation of the same dream. I'm in a school. I'm usually the teacher. The whole world has come. We learn in rooms of windows but no door and no walls. We are speaking in a language that no one has heard before but which everybody understands. There is one moment of a high wind blowing and one moment of sunlight brightening more and making the scene hard to make out.

There are more women than there are men.

There is an animal -- usually a four-legged animal.

At some point in the dream, somebody always comes back to life and someone won't come into the room.

I was on one side of a graveled road, my brother was on the other. Behind him was an old dormant filbert grove. I was holding a baseball bat. He threw me a perfect pitch, and I hit the ball deep into the grove. He ran off to look for it. The ball had hooked to the right, so I started walking in that direction down the road. After I’d walked about half a mile, I came to a restaurant. My brother was there. He said he couldn’t find the ball. There was a short line of people waiting to scrub their hands at a shiny metal sink. Behind the counter, my daughter was on a gurney, about to have a baby. I had no idea she was expecting. I hurriedly washed my hands. Somehow, even though I had never seen them before, I assumed the people ahead of me were her in-laws. There were no towels. I shook the water from my hands. I went behind the counter. My daughter was gone. A nurse told me they had taken her in already. I went back and washed my hands a second time. I went outside, and after walking a few feet across a wet lawn, I realized my hair and beard were covered with thick white spider webs. The more of them I removed, the more there were. I came to the corner of another building. I noticed something shiny by the foundation. When I bent down to look at it, a bright-green spider crawled into my hair.

After Reading Seduction of the Minotaur

I met a woman who was French and young. We met in a second hand clothing store. She was trying on a plaid jacket that I had just brought in to the store a short time before. The store was going to sell it for much more than I thought they would or than it was worth. She told a friend in French that she would buy the jacket and then bring it back, complaining that this and that was wrong with it, and that way she would get part of her money back. I seemed to understand what she was saying in French and tried to say something to her, also in French. She corrected my French saying that my verb was an old-fashioned way of saying something, no longer in use. I tried to say what she was saying to me—to repeat the French phrase after her with the correct accent. Since however my French was not expert, I had no way of knowing if what she was saying to me was correct in the first place.

Then the two of us walked around the store for a long time. In the course of those few hours I met two different men who were her husbands. One was young and black and held a child on his shoulders. The other was heavy-set, dressed casually and much older. He seemed to have a secret of some sort, because they made signals to each other about what they were doing. Finally the young woman suggested that we make an appointment to meet at another time. She said that since this meeting had gone on for so long it must have been an indication that we were compatible. Finally, we ended up sitting in a corner on a wooden bench, spending even more time talking, but I don’t know in what language. Then as we sat there we watched a guy put oil on his body and attach little silver candy balls all over him in neat rows, those little silver balls that can decorate cakes. We were above him and could see him from our bench. Then quite unexpectedly he was able to eat part of his arm without hurting himself. We could see his left-over arm, kind of jagged.

Woke up at 6 AM from dreams of a semi-rural dinner party, and the man on the radio predicting 6-9 inches of snow this weekend.

I am in a place that looks and feels familiar. The air here is thick, almost gelatinous, and it, too, feels familiar. I sit at a round table in the corner of a room painted creamy yellow and filled with light. Although I am right-handed, a pen is poised in my left. There is a large sheet of paper on the table before me, and it is filled with strange words made with letters I don't fully recognize, though I apparently wrote them. There is an extravagant aloe vera plant in a round terra cotta pot, and nothing else. A bird sings urgently outside.

A phone rings. Suddenly the receiver is in my left hand instead of the pen. I look at the caller i.d., which says "Neruda." I am astonished, and wonder how and why Neruda would be calling me from beyond the grave. I hesitate for a moment, then press the "talk" button. The sound on the other end is scratchy and distant. A barely audible male voice speaks my name, then something else I have trouble hearing or understanding. The only word I recognize, or perhaps remember, is "estilo," as in "stylus," and also "style." The line goes dead. I marvel at having heard Neruda's voice like that.

On the table in front of me now is a glass jar containing colorful fragments of vitrified tile decorated with glyphs and designs. A bright azure blue is the color that stands out most. I awaken here and remember the Spanish word for "tile" - "azulejo". "Azulejo," I say, "azulejo," again and again.

I dreamed the night before last that I needed to reach the top of a tall building, some forty stories high. The lift had broken down and I needed to climb at least the last set of stairs on foot. In my mind’s eye I could see the top level of stairs and to my horror they were not ordinary stairs, the enclosed solid stairs you find in stairwells alongside the lift. These were metal stairs with thin railings that wound around and up to the ceiling. From these stairs you could look down and see below to where you had come from. I could not climb these stairs. I would be giddy on such stairs. I would feel constantly fearful of falling. I could not make my journey to the top.

Then tonight I dreamed among other dreams I no longer remember that I was having dinner with an old colleague, Simone. She had invited another colleague Antoinette to join us at dinner. I am not aware that the names of these people seemed significant during the dream itself but the moment I woke up I knew that these were the women in my dream.

We were eating our meal at the top of a stair well on the landing. Out of nowhere, unprovoked it seemed, Antoinette threw herself over the stair rail into the void below. She fell down several flights and I knew she would be dead when we reached her body at the foot of the stairs. Dead she was, though her body was not smashed up, simply inert. Simone seemed to know more than I about why Antoinette had jumped. To Simone it seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But I was troubled.

Birds on the List

I've had two dreams of note
in the last couple of weeks
and only one I can remember right now
which I don't think is a dream in the sense
of some visual dream narrative
but some context of anxiety
I'm in a professional hockey game
sitting on the bench in full uniform
any second now the coach is gonna tell me go
and then I'll jump over the boards
but I can't skate very well at all
and I'm super embarrassed but I try to follow the puck
but I can barely move
and I know i'm gonna get drilled
by some little punk from grade school
who I never liked and was always better than
it's basically the same dream
as the one where you're sitting in class with only your underwear on
which is a pretty powerful sentiment
I mean sometimes I spend half my time
worrying to myself that I'm a fraud
and the other half proving i'm not

the other dream is better
it's deeper somehow and prizmatic
it's beautiful and special
but I can't remember it
I think it had something to do with war
I dreamt at least once maybe twice
I didn't want to forget it
I went around looking for it talking to friends
asking Becky if she remembered me talking about it
and she didn't
but she told me to write about
all the birds I should be so lucky to see
the birds on my list
the ones I've seen
and the ones I'm dreaming to see
and then it hit me, the dream

I was standing in total darkness
when this spectacular bird appeared and flew in front of me
looked at me squarely from the side of its head
it was a heron, large with a long and sharp beak
it had this incredible yellow streak on its crown
and I immediately misidentified it as a yellow-crown night heron
because behind it was black as night
with flashes of yellow and orange along it's crest
but it was almost uniformly blue
enormous
and absolutely unfazed by my presence
a simply beautiful dream
that failed to resound enough
for me to remember it

but I remember wondering when I woke up
if that kind of heron may exist in the world
and if not in the world
it exists now and I'm happy to see it
forget about it and remember it again
and have a chance to describe it

usually how it works is this
you look through the bird books and see the picture
or the peterson or sibley drawing
you try to figure out what time of year you might find it
and in what kind of environment
and then you have to be persistent in looking
but even then you have to be lucky
and if you find the bird it's truly uplifting
its forms a direct and unmitigated convergence of natural histories
the bird's and the birder's
but what of the dream birds, the abstract birds
the pest birds that follow humans
living off waste following the interstates
I won't forget seeing certain birds for the first time
american and least bittern, green heron, bald eagle
or seeing thousands of canada geese at Oak Orchard Swamp
they have been poetic moments

I almost forgot my dream night-heron
but now I won't
writing this poem while hanging out with friends all day today
and having the dream heron come back to mind
and making it public
skating out to center ice getting booed because i can barely move on skates
hoping to make a little something real out of the world
into the world

Looking out across this vast urbanscape, reminiscent of São Paulo, concrete high rises as far as the eye can see, I wonder how it's come to this. I'm very high up, on the open-sided top floor of a building undergoing further construction to make it taller still. In fact a good number of the buildings seem to be undergoing similar upward construction, evidenced by the huge cranes on top that swing around dropping steel girders into place with a clang. A fierce wind blows, giving me the sensation that if I don't retreat into the lower, finished section of the building, I'll blow right off the top.

I'm inside now, but a more imminent danger threatens. I'm on the hit list of some sinister agency that's hunting down dissenters and "disappearing" them. This, it turns out, is part of the purpose of the cranes on top of the buildings - the crane arms swing around and pluck dissenters out of the buildings, then deliver them to the head of the agency, a shadowy figure who inhabits one of the buildings.

A dark-haired woman in a white blouse and gray skirt comes rushing in. She speaks to me in Portuguese, telling me to come quickly. I follow her to another floor below that has no windows. It is dark, damp-smelling, and apparently safe, at least for now. She tells me to wait here, then rushes out as quickly as she appeared. I wait quietly in the dark, my heart pounding. The only sound now is that of my own breathing. I awaken here, and the sense of menace slowly dissipates.

last night: was very excited & curious to find self in n korea. wandered around among a lot of buildings atop huge hills, led to by vast gray sets of stairs. perfect & gorgeous constructivist-style pyongyang extending in all directions. then the thought, "but I warned Qingshan not to come to north korea, because what if he couldn't leave?" became concerned that I'd be mistaken for a spy. then met a deranged middle-aged american women holding a bundle of wild-colored balloons afoot some govt ministry building. can't remember what she said, but unsettling. first two things I saw when I woke up: (1) text message Qingshan had sent me in the night from china, which read "This truly is a huge, huge country with a long, long history"; (2) news reports of Obama's speech about nk rockets.

My son and I were watching what appeared to be a very large black TV screen. On it they were diagramming a new NASA project, a space station for actors. We watched as the house where the actors would live out in space, glided inside another glass structure that was something like a glass box. The house and the box were both made entirely of glass. I commented to my son that the glass was for the sake of a 360 degree view in outer space.

Then we were standing outside the glass house, waiting for a tour. Another person came up to join us for the tour. Quite suddenly he was inside and we were still outside. We knocked on the glass wall saying—you forgot us. The NASA scientist said he couldn't let us in. I screamed back at him, at the top of my lungs—and what are we, chopped liver?

"Hold out your hand," I say. "I have what you need." My directness alarms you.



I hold up my left hand, and a liquid red cord spills from my fingertips. "See - a scarlet penumbra," I say, drawing out the "num" and feeling the palpability of the syllable on my tongue.



I drop the cord into your open right palm. Although you say nothing, I can see that its substantial weight and warmth surprise you. I take one end and wrap it around your little finger.



"There," I say emphatically, "you know what to do," and awaken here.

I was with my son J, and friend D. and two Black ladies on the subway traveling around the city carrying a large cumbersome television, suitcases and one of the ladies seem to be in a wheel chair contraption with many straps. At first we seemed to be in the Rockaways, sense of being lost, underground, tired. Then, in a playground somewhere in Brooklyn. J wanted to hang out with a group of teens. I vaguely promise him "later." There is an idea to go to the Baseball Hall of fame which involves at least two more transfers to trains, uncertainty about exactly where it is; much dragging of our suitcases, the TV etc. We are on Metro North and I see from the window apartments made of crushed, recycled glass much compacted with tower, spire like structures like Rodia or Gaudi . Everything is glittering, bright. I keep saying I don't know where I am. Uncertainty as to whether we are in the Bronx or out of the city by the Hudson. We are then in a taxi driving uptown near Columbia Univerisity, an area unknown to me but often present in dream. We go down a very hilly street with cobblestones lined with small, almost quaint Korean restaurants. Sense of a new discovery of a part of the city I hadn't seen before. We see a kind of flea market or kiosks under tenting near a cathedral hidden in the shadows. Another often dreamt of, unseen building. I seem to have to walk very carefully around gates made of glass beads, everything precarious but fascinating. Lots of amethyst jewelry,crystals on tables. I realize the cathedral, which opens into the market, is of "The Scientific Americans" or "Christian Scientists." Realize that I need to investigate their religion more seriously. People seem to practice by going into darkened rooms with carpeted benches and then lie down with backs on the benches and feet on the floor in neat rows and then talk in low voices to one another about their feelings and spiritual process. Have an association with this cathedral and "Faberge Eggs."

A small gathering of slender, naked beings ... human perhaps, or distant star relatives ... the sound of an acoustic guitar gently being strummed ... I arrive at the upper edge of an immense stadium ... the seats are empty ... the music is coming from the stage far below ... I begin the long way down.

I’m standing in the graveled driveway in front of the house where I grew up when a kitchen on wheels pulls in. It has trailer house sides, but no steering wheel or windshield; the front end is a counter. Behind the counter is a friendly long-haired young couple I know from somewhere. They definitely know me. I say, “Welcome back.” The man offers me a cup of coffee. I say, “Coffee?” and the woman sighs and says, “Yes, that’s all we have this year.” After they give me the coffee, the man hands me three or four filtered cigarettes and a hand-rolled one that won’t stay together. I end up with loose tobacco in my hand.

Soon, a small crowd gathers, and we are inside the kitchen in a little sitting room behind the counter. I can’t find my coffee. A stranger points to a paper cup sitting on the window ledge. Through the ledge I can see the pine tree in our front yard. I notice then that I still have the cigarettes in my hand, and a new book of matches with several extra flaps, which are glossy-beige and unfold in opposite directions. Wondering if there is an advertisement for a correspondence course inside, I pry open the flaps. The inside cover is blank. I strike a match, but it goes out before I can light the cigarette. I try two more times, but a breeze coming through the window blows out the matches. Finally, I succeed. The cigarette has no flavor whatsoever.

Someone, I don’t know who, mentions the fact that the vineyards in the area are budding out beautifully this spring. Hearing this, I suddenly remember that I have completely forgotten to prune ten acres of vines along the north side of the property. I feel horribly guilty about this. Puffing on my flavorless cigarette, I realize that the only way I can possibly prune ten acres of vines is if I quit writing and prune like a madman for eight or nine hours a day to keep the vineyard from going to ruin. I am torn between what I should do and what I must do. I wake up thinking, “another vineyard dream.”

I dreamed of those this morning. Big sci-fi python-type snakes. I had a hose that I was using to spray the path I was walking so I wouldn't slip. A snake coiled up my hose forcing me to abandon it. I kept walking without my hose and then a smaller snake in a bush bit me in the arm. Ouch. I felt it when I woke up.

In this dream there was a veterinarian office, which was also my dentist, two distinct visits to my dentist, brightly colored foamy substance all over the dentist's office that was attributed to an exploding squirrel, a very suspicious nurse who interrogated me as to why I was in waiting room, a guy with drinking straws poking out of the skin on his face, two poets, one of whom I had to make clear I AM NOT PLAYING FOOTSIES, and the other showed me a gift that I hoped was for me, but was really for his daughter, a school bus with strange graffiti that used to belong to the Obama campaign, an irresponsible man who was supposed to be my father and made me late to my first dentist appointment, a book review magazine that I already read, women folk not wanting to sit next to one another, an ugly green outfit, plans for a family photo shoot and a wild accusation that I bought a dog brush.

The children showed me where to lie down on the grass. Then they covered me with a sheet and told me to guess which of them was touching me. I felt little fingers on my head, then on the tip of my nose, on my knees, through my shoes ... and then, suddenly, the sheet was pulled away and a friend of mine said he wanted me to write something for the little newspaper he was publishing.

I was both watching and/or were
an Art dealer
of painters older aging
gifted but forgotten
disguised among musty spattered rooms
paying them merely the not too low

this dealer sees the death
of his secret favorite
HALO
over a honeymoon

his paintings brought to market, reluctant
some still in jars and in tears
to his core they spoke
knowing this worlds most misunderstood
these treasures
were fortunate
saved in a vault of these friends
paint from yesterday’s blood
from the previous dream

It should be understood this happens
22 months after the fact

Here came together my life's multiple basements
One friend wondered where his stuff vanished
There had been the flood
Another protested never allowed a move there
i had to explain two fathers
a step and real whose power over had banished them

Then there was the blood of my murdered friend
dried upon floor thick and crumbled
left till the completed investigation-now over
cleaning with the too small towel
returned liquidity I was watched
spread sunk blacken scumble edged
beneath a sink of too high
and out of reach of cleansing water

i don't know, Laura Moriarty was there...we were standing in a group on the field at Woodside Elementary in Concord...Brandon Brown was probably there, but sort of as a black amorphous blob...and then suddenly a young Ron Silliman walks up...and he looks exactly like Michael Koshkin...he's handsome, and short...he has five o'clock shadow and a fade...he's wearing stylish black rimmed glasses...i think to myself "wow, i'm like 3 actual feet taller than young Ron Silliman"...and then Moriarty is talking about her poetics and i'm mouthing over Brandon Brown cum black amorphous blob's shoulder "it's young Ron Silliman...this is fucking crazy...young Ron Silliman is here..." but Moriarty doesn't quite get what i'm saying, looks at me confused, and keeps on talking about her poetics...and now we're walking down Pierce St. in front of my building...and it's raining...and i get a running start and slide a few feet on the slick pavement...i'm sort of showing off...and then from behind me comes young Ron Silliman sliding down the street...only he slides a lot farther than i did...and he suddenly looses control, falls back and hits his head on the pavement...and he goes limp...and he keeps sliding down the block...and now i notice a thick trail of blood on the pavement...and i run up to young Ron Silliman and he's dazed and bleeding profusely from the head...and i see that young Ron Silliman has cracked his skull pretty bad...and now i'm taking him into my apartment and wrapping his head in a bath towel...and the blood is soaking through the towel...and i think young Ron Silliman is dying...and suddenly i'm thinking about Natasha Richardson and i'm getting really scared for young Ron Silliman which makes me think about my 7th grade teacher...and how her and her husband went to Tahoe for the weekend on a ski trip...they went to Alpine Meadows which is where i used to ski as a kid...and that was the week she had been teaching us about poetry...we wrote haiku, persona poems, we attempted sonnets...i wrote a haiku about a bloody knife, and a sonnet about my grandma's soft skin...and then later we learned that my teacher's husband had been in an accident...he'd collided with a tree that weekend...and he'd died...and now i'm standing in my bathroom on a rainy night with young Ron Silliman who's bleeding from the head thinking about my 7th grade teacher's husband who died in a skiing accident and i can't remember her name...and i'm remembering all of this this morning driving to work listening to A Confederacy of Dunces on CD thinking about Ron Silliman's review of Jared Hayes's RecollecTED which came out at the end of our time together at Naropa which made me think about drinking beers with Michael Koshkin on his porch in Boulder writing silly drunk poems about Ted Berrigan's saggy scrotum based on a postcard of Berrigan in his underwear stuck to Koshkin's refrigerator...and then i thought, oh yeah, young Ron Silliman, he looked exactly like Michael Koshkin in my dream last night...

George Quasha is hosting a call-in radio contest in which he recites a line of verse from a well-known poem, then challenges listeners to call in with the correct next line of verse. The first person who calls in with the correct response gets a prize, plus a crack at another poetry challenge with a more obscure poem.

I'm at home listening to the program on the radio, but somehow simultaneously seeing George doing the program in the radio studio, as if the very act of listening allows me to see everything, which feels perfectly natural to me.

So I'm sitting here listening/seeing, and George begins the first challenge with the following line of verse, which he says is from Shakespeare:
"If your true love you find not..."

He gives out the call-in number (a variation on his waking life number, with a different area code), and waits for the calls to come in.

I know instantly what the correct second line of verse is:

Try, try again"

I grab the phone to call. But things keep going wrong: first the light on the handset goes out, so I can't finish punching in the number and have to start over; now the line suddenly goes dead; now I press the wrong number and have to start over, and on and on. At first I'm feeling anxious and frustrated by all these stymied attempts to get through, but this feeling suddenly gives way to a recognition of the absurdity of it all. I start laughing even as I keep trying to call, then really start cracking up when alternative second lines start popping into mind spontaneously as alternatives to the "correct" one.

The only one I remember now is:
"If your true love you find not..."
"For godssake, just look out the damn window"

Soon I'm laughing so hard I can't even try to punch in the number anymore. I laugh myself awake.

I was on a charterd bus from Kent to Washington DC. we were going to a rally & march advocating trying Bush/Cheney for war crimes. also on the bus were friends from my university days & Elizabeth Taylor. I askd the actress if she'd ever been on a bus before. she sd "once. at an airport."

I dreamed this morning that I was growing all these extra toes. They were a little shorter than my other toes kind of budding up in between. Seven total on the right foot and eight on the left, I think.

I'm at what must be a zoo watching these strange animals that are perfectly round. They have big saucer-like eyes and walk upright on long, skinny legs with knobby knees. I can't figure out what they are, and from my vantage point I can't even tell if they have fur or feathers. It almost looks as if they're in a husk, which makes them look more like coconuts on stork legs than either birds or mammals. They're strutting about, and disconcertingly silent, as there's no sign of either beak or mouth from which they might utter a sound. Something seems really off about them, and I feel vaguely disoriented just looking at them, though nobody else seems to be affected so.

As I start to walk away I see there are some discarded "husks" from the creatures behind their enclosure, so I go over to investigate. Even as I look more closely, I can't tell if they really are natural husks, or costumes made out of papier machê. I start imagining that it's all a hoax, and that the "animals" in the enclosure are really miniature circus people dressed in these round husks, and that they're walking on stilts. But wait - stilts with knee joints? I wake up not knowing.

This morning I dreamed that my husband and I were attending a series of events held on the corner of Toorak and Tooronga Roads near to where we live. The venue on the open street overlooked the city in the distance and had the walled construction site of the new Tooronga shopping centre as its backdrop.

The woman conducting proceedings was a dark haired, pretty young thing, with Mediterranean eyes and glossy hair. She spoke from a pulpit set up on the nature strip. She came across as part evangelist, part singer and performer, and part newsreader. She tended to begin her performance with a serious introduction, some news of the world, a type of exhortation to live a good life, and then moved into a comic musical routine that appeared to win the hearts of her audience.

I was sceptical myself. I did not trust her. There was also a serious older man who stood by and occasionally spoke. He was the moderator, the one who kept things on track. The audience sat on the other side of Toorak Road. Someone had stopped all the traffic for these events.

On our second visit to hear the woman speak, my husband and I went for a walk mid proceedings through local side streets. For no apparent reason my husband stopped mid step. He was upset. By the time we arrived back at our car in readiness for a resumption of proceedings, he had become even more distressed and was visibly crying. He took a call on his Blackberry. I only managed to hear the tail end of his conversation.

‘Thanks, Elaine,’ he had said.

‘Who’s she?’ I asked. My husband told me then the story of how he had been having terrible and recurrent nightmares. Nightmares that were set in some place like the United Arab Emirates in which some dignitary, a Sheik or some such person, would cut out the rib cages of young women and leave them to bleed to death. The dreams were horrific and my husband said he could not bear them any longer. He wanted to do something about them, to understand them, and for this reason he had contacted the young woman who was at this moment at her pulpit performing. Elaine was her assistant. My husband considered that the performer was like a psychologist and he had made arrangements to see her that afternoon.

‘Fair enough,’ I said. I opened the car door to go back to the performance, but I was worried about leaving a large flat tray of melted ice cream on the back seat near where my husband was now sitting. I was fearful the ice cream might spill or that my husband might fall into it.

I went to resume my seat on the nature strip with the rest of the audience. My husband would listen to the performance from the car, he said. Then he asked me through the open window,

‘Was I happy?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I was happy enough. I wondered whether he might be wondering about the affair I had had some time ago that was now over and whether this young woman he planned to visit that afternoon would in turn fall in love with him. All young women fall in love with my husband, I thought – his gentleness to strangers, his sharp intelligence and his wit.

My husband sat in the back seat of the car crying. His skin looked tanned and he seemed to have lost weight. His skin almost shone with good health but he looked so unhappy.

‘Your happiness,’ he said to me, ‘is a Baptist type happiness’. I did not understand his words, (I still don’t) but I was struck by the strange way religious references had crept into our otherwise almost religion free lives. My memory of the dream ends here.

On a school campus on the edge of a sidewalk I find a baby that at first looks like a doll. His neck is very extended and it appears to be decaying. I push the head down closer to the shoulders and this seems to help.

Later I am in the office where I usually work at my usual desk. Then I realize that my boss has left for good and so I move to his old desk and take my phone and all its cords and messages with me. To the side of his desk are many brown bags of his projects along with bags of trash. It is hard to tell which is which. I have a good laugh with the woman who is taking my desk when I finally get why she was sitting beside me. We start laughing in relief that we don’t have to work at the same desk that is way too small for two people.

Then at some point there is a girl in a blue sweater who comes running in to report that a student is causing problems by trying to lure snakes onto a blanket on the grass. The girl is hysterical and has a pockmarked face. It occurs to me that we can’t help her.

I’m in the kitchen, holding a large brown raw egg. I start peeling the egg. Bit by bit, the shell falls away, but the membrane stays intact. I handle the egg as carefully as I can, but there’s one place where the membrane is torn. There’s a small frying pan on top of the stove, also a cardboard box full of old letters. The refrigerator opens; a gust of air lifts empty bread wrappers from the countertop. They land on the cold burners. I wonder how I’m supposed to fry an egg under these circumstances. A woman standing nearby says I’m not supposed to fry it, I’m supposed to see how long I can hold it. Now, through the tear in the membrane, I see a dark red flower.