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I tend to sleep in three hour blocks, and have told myself for years now that I would start writing down my dreams every time I woke up.  Think of all the ideas that I would save from being forgotten, I’d tell myself, not to mention the hundreds, maybe thousands of stories that were being lost each year alone.  Add up all those years of dreaming, and well, you see what we’re all missing out on here.

Of course it never happens.  You see, the thing about waking up every three hours or so is that all that motivation you had going into the sleep tends to become lost as you come out of it.  Motivation, I’m thinking, is a lot like the details of a dream, with only a very small window of opportunity that must be grabbed onto in order for the whole thing to come together.  Seriously, tell me this.  How many dreamers do you know who are also motivated?  I’m not saying they don’t exist, because they do, I know that.  I’m just saying I’m not one of them.

And since I’m alone here in the house at the moment, I don’t see any others around who fit the description, so naturally, I’m forced to come to the conclusion that motivated dreamers are few and far between.

I don’t even see any out the window I’m sitting by, and I can see pretty far out this one.

But!  Having said all that, it just so happens I was motivated enough last night to jot down some notes lying there in bed in the dark, the idea being that when the sun finally came up (which it is doing this very minute where I’m at) I would find myself looking at either something entertaining enough to share with the world, some deep, dark secret revealed to me for the first time, leading to a higher level of self-awareness and enlightenment, or a great, world-changing idea, which I would be happy to share with everyone for free.  I dream generously, you should know, so there should be enough to go around.

Before I get to the dreams, however, I should let you know that when I woke up around 1 a.m. I was just a little bit angry.  I wasn’t gritting my teeth or anything like that, which I think proves I’m a sensible, level-headed guy, because what I was angry about (just a little) was that the show I’d recorded and finally gotten around to watching wasn’t anything at all like how it’d been described in the synopsis, and I hate false advertising, even when I wake up at 1 a.m.  Even more when it’s tricked me. 

I’d recorded this show that’d claimed it was about some sort of Alaskan, Bermuda Triangle-style mystery.  Alaskan natives tell of mysterious spirits that steal people in the Alaskan Triangle, or something like that the synopsis had read, but the whole show ended up being about a couple of planes that went missing and couldn’t be found after extensive searches.  ”Every resource was used to find the missing U.S. Senator - Senator!  I should have known a politician was behind this!  Besides, who in their right mind wants to find a missing Senator? - and to this day, his disappearance, along with those he was flying with, remains a mystery.

Now that I’m writing my own mystery involving a spirit, I thought it made good sense to promote myself to mystery expert, which I’m thinking, should speed up the writing of this book considerably.  But that’s a side note, nothing more.  Something to add to your vast collection of information about me.

Do you ever think about how much junk you put into your brain?  No, I don’t either.

Anyway, I woke up mad not because the Senator (I forgot his name the moment they said it) stayed missing, but because the entire show, which had lured me there in the first place by promising stories from the Alaskan natives about mysterious spirits whisking away people, didn’t bother to talk with a single Eskimo about what was going on.  They didn’t even bother to add a single mysterious, native drum beat to a single scene of this so-called Alaskan Triangle.  And then they drew the area on the Alaskan map and that was when I really started getting mad.  It wasn’t a triangle-shaped area at all that the people were disappearing in, but more of a trapezoid!

But enough about my emotional stability.  To the dreams!

One

This first seemed to take place in a library, although it also had bookstore qualities about it, which ended up being true because when I started looking through a section of science fiction I found a small paperback with a slightly torn cover that I decided I was going to buy.  The fun fact of this particular dream is that the author’s name, which escapes me now, happened to be some sort of combination of H.G. Wells and Herbert Hoover.  Combine those two names somehow and that’s who wrote the book I was going to buy.

I was a grown man in the dream, but for whatever reason, my mom and dad had come to pick me up.  They were still married, although I knew in the dream that they were, in fact divorced (as they are in waking life), and I found myself watching them from behind the stacks of books, noticing how they kept a distance from one another while they walked around, waiting on me.

I’m almost ready, I told them, deciding at the last second that I needed to find a book on ghosts, which this morning, brings up what I suppose is a valid question.  Do I actually need to do some research on ghosts for the hermit’s story?  Should I try to work in some valid ghost facts, or just wing it and make up all my own? 

Two

Around 3:30 a.m. I woke again, this time jotting down some notes that involved the actor Peter MacNicol in his role as Dr. Larry Fleinhardt in the television show, Numb3rs.  We were discussing the universe and he was telling me about a string theory-based musical that he and some others in his department were going to be putting on, and that maybe I would be interested in attending.

“We’ve worked out a lovely little sashay number,” he said, which in the dream I took to mean song more then dance.

We talked more about the vastness of space, and I asked him if our molecular structures, which seemed to not only form us, but to be in constant motion around us and within us, spinning, forming, appearing, etc., might have a tendency to be drawn into other molecular structures simply by focus.  The astronomer, for example, whose passion builds because the stars pull at him as much as he pulls for the stars.  That somehow we are drawn into both infinite and finite space by paying attention to it and focusing.  Friendship and love, for instance, nothing more then attention to another’s details.  The artist or poet, drawing their insight not somewhere from within, but rather somewhere between themselves and whatever it is they’ve chosen to focus their attention on.  An artist such as Renoir, for example, saw the exact same light and subject as everyone else, yet was able to focus and draw from this environment something that others around him were not.

We walked and talked some more.

It was a good dream, although I wouldn’t have minded swapping Peter MacNicol for Navi Rawat.  Now there’s a smile worth dreaming about.

On the upside, at least it wasn’t a Judd Hirsch dream.  Not that I’ve ever had one.  My fingers are crossed.

Three

I don’t remember much about the final dream of the night, other than books were involved again somehow.  I was at a kiosk in the mall, looking over a children’s book that had a secret inside place that you could hide your teddy bear in, which I thought was kind of clever, although now that I’m awake, I’m not so sure.  Would a kid want to put their teddy bear inside a book and close the cover?

Anyway, the moment my eyes popped open, the dream and the waking world collided into another of my futuristic ideas that is sure to come true.  This one - the eventual union of public education with the retail sector, resulting in school classrooms that are built as part of a large shopping mall.  The kids will earn credits for attending and passing classes, which they can redeem at any of the mall’s shops which are, naturally, located along the hallways that the kids pass through on their way to their next class.  I even envisioned periods of history being divided up into sellable, corporate sponsorships.  The Victoria’s Secret Renaissance, “bringing out the architecture in every woman” for example, or how about The Cingular Wireless Industrial Revolution.

I’m full of good ideas.  It’s just a matter of time before someone starts asking for them.

The mornings are always cool where I live, so when I get up I grab a sweatshirt before sitting back down on the edge of the bed so I can watch Imaginary Keith dream.  The fan is running, blowing across the bed, a constant sound, drowning out the rush of the occasional car on the road out front.  With the windows open the sound from the road is loud, but the fan helps, and it’s Saturday morning, before six.

He’s holding a gun on some people, but I don’t know why.  Three guys, maybe four, and a woman, who he stands across from, joking, in spite of the guns they have held on each other.  Beauty in dreams has a way of not holding still.  It flows and moves, more event then thing, something to enjoy rather then hold. 

Some people keep it all behind their eyes, he tells her.  In others, their stance, the way they hold themselves against the world, offering, then retreating, then offering again.  A constant dance.  I see my friend, staring at the woman’s face, the edges of the picture her hair, the men around her, the fence to his back, and the slow rise and fall of her chest as she breathes, her lips slightly parted.

The lightest of freckles across her cheeks, barely visible.  You have to look right at the freckles to see them, too faint to spot by chance.  Does he see them, I wonder.  Did the fan blow them there, across my friend’s dream?

The guns are gone and they are laughing, then kissing, then in a small rental house of a friend.  They will live there.  It’s hard to describe, a jerky business, but watching a dream, and even better, dreaming a dream, is a change that is constant and smooth.  Dreams move and flow in and out of themselves, making sense.  Nothing holds still.  They are like life, my life.  Describing it is impossible, watching it a bit less impossible, living it the easiest thing of all three.  I watch my friend and the woman, dreaming together.

Hands moving over the outside of clothes, her leaning into him, him into her.  They are smiling, then looking around, then wandering.  Fingers set off passions that lead nowhere, which then turn into the architecture of the small house, hallway after hallway, rooms around every corner.  Doors to open, places to explore.  Look, she says, pointing to something sitting on a window ledge.  He leans past her, close, her hair brushing past his face; he breathes her in.

I watch the dream slowly slip away from my friend after that, disappearing as he tries to focus on the window.  He doesn’t know what it is the woman is trying to show him.  I see him searching, slowly losing himself, beginning to fade.  Then darkness.  He will sleep another hour, maybe two.

I move around the house, opening doors and more windows, inviting in the cold morning air.

Is everything temporary?  Even beauty?  Or does it have something to do with being forever on the move, that slipping motion from one existence or focus to another, the way dreams seem to slip away from us while we sleep?  Isn’t the dream still there, inside of us, lost somewhere in the brightness of the morning light.  Do dreams shine all day, invisible somehow to open eyes?

The boy sleeps and the cat runs in and out of the house through the open doors.

The coffee tastes good.

A neighbor’s rooster crows, far off in the distance, once, then twice, then yet again.

Bird song and a tractor starting up, three, maybe four farms down.

I see a copy of an Immanuel Velikovsky book on the shelf, Ages in Chaos, and think about my dad.  When was it that he read the Velikovsky books?  Earth in Upheaval and Oedipus and Akhnaton, I think are the titles.  The early 80’s, maybe?  They are the only books that I know of my dad reading, which seems odd in itself.  Why those, and why then?  And why did he quit reading, or did he?  The man is as unknown to me today as is what lies behind the pages of the Velikovsky books.  I remember us briefly discussing them once, a long time ago, but I was too young to hold my own, although the memory sticks with me as perhaps the closest we ever came, him and I, to actually opening up and talking about our own personal takes on what this universe could possibly mean and be about. 

I’ve never read the Velikovsky books, although I can see them, even now, sitting on the shelf next to the aquarium that I have grown to hate, then grown to ignore.  Twenty-five years they’ve waited for me, making me think that perhaps books are the one beautiful thing in this world that actually knows how to hold still. 

Is it possible that books are the dreams, visible in the light?  That writers are people who never quite wake up?

If Imaginary Keith ever wakes up I will ask him.  Are you awake, my friend, or are you still staring at freckles scattered across some imagined woman’s face, mistaking them for stars?

I need to turn a tractor-trailer rig around for an employee who has made a wrong turn.  We’re near the farm.  62nd St., normally a two-lane paved, becomes a narrow, unused gravel road, overgrown with weeds and grass.

I stop along the road at a house, talk with a woman, and agree to paint the house.  I’m not sure how we’ll do this.

When I get back to the farm the barn is in the process of being completely reconstructed.  A large pond is being dug in the southeast corner of the field.  There is a paved road, cutting straight through the farm, and crews are moving power and sewer lines because of the barn work.  I remember thinking that only a small bit of work was going to get done - one man for one day.  There must be over a hundred workers, around the barn, in the field, and reconstructing the road.  I realize it will cost me a fortune.

I confront a man rebuilding part of the barn.  “I’ve made a change,” he says.  “The floor will last ten years and the changes cost $5,000.”

“I need to see the numbers,” I tell him, and he threatens to hit me in the head with his hammer.

I lead him to the edge of the property and see him to his truck.

There was a different vice-president, and he was the second fastest man in the world, losing a 100m sprint to a South African.

I was standing in an unemployment line, next to a woman who leaned in so close her nose rested against my cheek.  I stared straight ahead at the other men in line as she made small bird sounds in my ear.  The line didn’t seem to move.

I was shaking hands with guests at a party.  Suddenly my dad was there in the line.  I shook his hand as if we were strangers, noticing that his fingernails were dirty and needing trimming.

I rode a bike that was much too small for me down a street.  I pretended the bike was a horse and slapped at it’s haunches, making some people standing on the sidewalk laugh.  Wherever I was going was four blocks away.  A long ride on such a small bike.