Dreamlife

  This dream is worth getting up at 5 a.m. to record it. I am in a
place of remote place of great natural beauty: the grass is lush and
the low-hanging trees are thick around me. I am walking near a road
with my teacher and we meet Dan C___sson and stop to talk to him. (Or
do I meet them separately?) We walk on and my teacher tells me that Dan
is taking a long time to write something foolish and predictable, I no
longer recall what.
   Then he opens up a book, something by an American author,
to show me a passage. Since I don’t understand it even in the dream and
since I have forgotten many of the words, I have no hope of extracting
meaning from it with my waking mind and record what little I recall
simply to remind myself of the deeply inspired feeling that accompanies
this dream. The passage begins with a girl giving a certain gift to a
fellow in the story, a hunter or dreamer. It ends with the admonition
“But from above and below, a lethe comes and takes…” (“Ether” would
make sense here but “lethe” is the word I seem to remember. My dreams
have words now.) My teacher asks me what this tells us about the
difference between the journals of the hunter and the hunted (perhaps
this wording is also part of the passage). I am at a loss, so he tells
me that it describes the ability of ____ to make x dollars but also to
make much less.

  Altering my schedule has induced me to neglect this dreamlog for
a while, so I want to record a couple of recent dreams before they fade.
  In one dream, that sounds but does not feel trivial, I am
standing on an island in the middle of a desolate avenue that resembles
but is not the same as the one that leads to my house in waking life.
The street is nearly empty of vehicles and passersby but a youth who
seems familiar comes by and suggests we go somewhere but I tell him I
am waiting for someone or something, so he moves on.
  I suppose I get tired of waiting, since I walk uphill toward the
houses opposite me. I go up a winding block and enter a house. In a
large room, some of the kids who frequent my gym in waking life are
standing around. I don’t have any sense whether I am their age or my
current one in the dream, but in any case, I join in their banter. On
the floor is a bench that curves upwards. I lie down on it and try to
flatten my body against its resistance.
  In the second dream, almost completely forgotten, I am at sea
traveling on a ship. A friend of mine is on the boat as well but I
never see her–we use cell phones or walkie talkies to relate to each
other our location and what we are doing. There are people aboard I do
interact with directly but I’ve forgotten the nature of those
interactions.