Dream Piece

 

Photo via Hilgersom Landscaping.

Woke up before 5:00 with this ridiculously bloggy dream, giving me unusual time to structure it in my mind before the alarm rang. It features a character I actually don't know at all except online, the blogger known as Thers (of the the very funny old Whiskey Fire, defunct two or three years ago, but still a welcome presence on Twitter, and, this may be relevant, an English lit instructor in the CUNY system with a specialty in Irish writers); but I'm somehow at his house, in an improbably ritzy suburb, socially distanced in a driveway lined with a flagstone wall and a little round lantern faintly glowing on the pavement. There are women around, but in the background.

I'm there to show him a thing I've written, in a magazine that he's holding, but neither of us has a clear sense of why I'm doing it—I 'm under the impression he invited me for some reason, but he's confused and asking, very courteously, what I'm expecting him to do. A sudden inspiration: what I want is for him to submit something, a "critical essay", I suggest, to the magazine, which I'm apparently the editor of. He smiles.

I'm looking at the lantern, and it's the head of the newscaster Dan Rather, with a green growth on the top like a Chia pet. I'm perturbed by the apparent violence of this, but reassured when Rather himself looks completely comfortable, and he's smiling too. And then that's about it, I'm awake.