Dreams

Sometimes the bus comes right away, before you can even think about the myriad of things you have to do, it materializes as if it's very shape was given form by your need. Other days you stand in the rain without an umbrella waiting for a bus that no longer exists, that perhaps, now that you think of it, never existed. But it's hard to focus because your shoes are suede, and it's now very wet. On this parable or story hangs some of the law and the majority of the prophets.


He dreamed, as all dreamers do, that he was made up of bits and pieces of himself, as if his memory, which was sort of true, had been raided by a crow, looking for shiny things, gum wrappers, aluminum foil, to construct a nest. It was these disparate things, an old grey day at the beach, a woman he's seen in passing on the train, a memory of his grandmother's pearl brooch, through which his reality, like some fun house mirror was made. The reality of the dream that is. True reality, of the sort that you and I inhabit tends to be far less interesting and more bound by temporal and substantial things like alarm clocks and brown chaise lounge chairs pushed up against the wall to block wall sockets from curious toddlers. That is not the type of reality that we need though.

He walked through the dream land as a traveler passing through veils of silk on his way to sleep with a beautiful brown skinned woman who reminds him of his mother and his wife, and of all the unsent e-mails, botched cover letters, and scarred furniture of his youth. She had a mole on her right thigh in the shape of the Milky Way, or maybe it was a trash bag that he'd seen blowing across the street while waiting for the cross town bus. Reality is a bit-h who always has nicer shoes than you.

He slipped underneath the layers of the dream, which were shaped like waves, and his mind was the prow of some unmanned ship wandering the seas, main mast whipped by winds and ragged white sails hung loose like the flesh on all the dead sailor's bones. And then he was awake. He had forgotten that today was Tuesday. Tuesday. Tuesday. He was supposed to do something on Tuesday. Oh yes, he lay his head down quietly on a very rigid pillow. He had promised that he would go grocery shopping and buy bananas. It was okay now to sleep.