Dreams from the Station

Dream About the W.A.S.P.s

I dreamt that we were at a party.  I was squatting in the living room at the party handling foreign currency.  Two W.A.S.P. men in dark grey suits—we were partygoers new to each other—told us to keep the money.  We removed the bills from a black leather album.  Later, one of the W.A.S.P.s stopped me in the hallway.  He seemed intent on going to one of the bedrooms, but I had no interest, and my eyes dropped.  He said, “You were raped,” and I said, “sorry.”  Then the other W.A.S.P. man appeared in the hall.  The two of them lifted me up and carried me into a bedroom while I fought them.  One of the men withdrew a needle from a pack and inserted it into my leg at the ankle.  I was screaming but my screams were muffled by their hands.  I was calling to all coasts, “Michael!” in a low growl.  I had never once had a needle in me besides at a doctor's office.  What is going to happen to me? Is it a virus?  A drug?  Then I woke up, glad to be safe but alarmed.

Dream in Snow Circle

I dreamt that we were in the snow.  The snow looked like the tundra.  My sister was there and was looking at me from inside the snow circle near the house.  She was knitting or mending.  Pierre Joris was standing in open snow, wearing a parka, and the fur ruff on his hood made him look sincere.  I told my sister, “That's Pierre Joris.  He's a poet.”  “Oh,” she said.  Then Pierre came to talk to me.  He had a collection of record albums indoors; we went inside to search the records and see the equipment.  The phone rang.  A freelance client named Matthew, who had unwillingly given up a chance to work with me to a man named Clay, was calling to warn me that Clay had ripped up a plastic milk jug in the house they rented, while claiming the jug was me.  When I got off the phone, I wanted to play my “Sound Experiment” for Pierre, knowing he might like it if it were played properly with the right equipment, but it didn't seem possible: a French feminist in a caftan had come into the room and was applying cream to her elbows.  She ordered the equipment.  Pierre said to me, “I'm horny.”  “I can read French,” I told him.  “If you heard my French, you would laugh.”  My sister stayed outside near the snow circle mending.

Dream About Leo

I dreamed that I drove to the A.A. meeting in my real car, a silver-gray Infiniti FX35.  I brought prescriptions from the pharmacy in their original wrappers with the instructions tucked inside.  The pharmacy had given me a free prescription as a promotion—something for the vagina, though I'd had no complaint.  It was Tuesday night at St. Luke's, the church where I was baptized.  I always say that about St. Luke's—“the church where I was baptized”—as if I owned the place.  Leo Kottke was there, and, for a change, it didn't make me nervous.  I just slipped through the door.  There was no meeting in session, but people from the meeting and other people, too, were gathered.  It was the Christmas holiday season.  I had not seen Mr. Kottke in something like twelve years.  I had bags, and he had bags.  Besides the bags from the pharmacy, I had my work in satchels.  Leo Kottke had his work in satchels, too.  I fished in one of my satchels for a copy of Country Without a Name to show him.  I thought it was appropriate to start there, with work we had done since we had last seen each other, and he thought it was appropriate, too, and began fishing in his satchels for work to show me.  Country Without a Name and Solzhenitsyn Jukebox are ebooks, however, and no true print copy of them exists; instead, I had booklets made from them on my printer.  I couldn't find the best version with the illustrations by Daniel Harris, and instead found a prototype with a drawing of Leo Kottke on the cover.  It looked like a doodle I had made of him, as if in my daydreams I had him in mind for my writing.  It embarrassed me that I couldn't find the real and finished version.  I explained that it was an ebook, and he said he'd seen it because he had downloaded it from the Internet.  Then he took my hair and neck in his fingers, and he kissed me.  He kept on kissing me.  It was pleasing and exactly as I'd imagined it would have been had we started kissing in real life back when it now seemed we must both have known we had wanted to.  I wanted to ask him, but knew it was better not to, why he hadn't written to me long ago.  If it was so easy to kiss each other now, why hadn't he written to me in response to my letters (sent to his publicist) and kissed me then?  I didn't ask because the passion of the kissing, also the ease of it, the simple familiarity, brought us into present tense.  I became cooperative with my heart and his.  He had a plan, he said.  “Let's move all our belongings into the hallway and begin to transfer them to our cars.”  He had so many things with him, not, it seemed, because he was homeless, but because he was camping or on the road performing.  Susan Tepper was there helping with Christmas preparations.  It was easy, as in real life, to get along with her.  Leo went down the hallway.  I assumed he was moving some of his things.  I began organizing my things and thought of the complimentary prescription for vaginal healing.  When he did not return for a while, I went to look for him.  He had gone into the church where a Christmas concert was in session.  He sat in a school desk near the top of the sanctuary.  He looked a little drunk.  He asked for another drink.  He was drinking an almond-colored foamy concoction.  I looked at him as if sorry, and he said, “Don't feel sorry for me.”  Drinks were being served on the grand piano.  Sam Chauncey was one of the men serving the drinks.  I said, ‘Sam,” and he said, “Ann, ask your question.”  I said, “What is in this drink?  Is it alcohol?”  And Sam said that the almond-colored drink had a low alcohol content, and the cranberry drink did not.  Someone said, “Maybe Leo is not used to drinking any alcohol, and the low alcohol content went directly to his brain.”  I returned to where he sat in the school desk, carrying an almond-colored drink.  I served it to him.  Our plan had shifted, but we didn't mention it.  He seemed to be in his own mind and amused by it.