We’re at some kind of barbecue. A social setting, quite possibly extending from our Smoking Garden. I keep trying to put something on my plate – a sampling of this, a portion of that – but things keep spilling to the ground. Maybe I even miss my plate altogether. You’re trying to offer me something extra special you made, but even it fails to reach my mouth. But instead of being angry, you’re quite sympathetic and understanding, as if you know I’m sick or getting there.

One sequence involves covering a political convention. Miami? Savannah? Charlotte?

THE FIRST PART takes place in a large room with gauzy tea-color curtains and a slight breeze, likely a hotel ballroom. I see a friend from my high school days across the room but she does not see me and moves from the scene before I can break off the conversation I’m in.

THE SECOND SCENE is in a makeshift newsroom, lots of lively activity – Hugh McDiarmid may be running the show. I meet a young brunette (short hair), and there’s her coy, smiling reaction.

THINGS HEAT UP, but now I’m watching a young male with her (that is, somehow I’ve distanced myself). She’s ready for something wild – perhaps in a room just off the newsroom – a storage room? But the male, realizing how little he knows her, discovers he doesn’t have a condom and a wild pursuit follows … asking his coworkers, Do you have a …

THERE’S AN INTERLUDE of being out, as a team, covering the story and then trying to phone the newsroom, which is working out of borrowed space in another newspaper. (Part of the chain? Professional courtesy?) The switchboard has no idea what we’re talking about … until someone says something about … ?

A spate of dreams no doubt reflecting my {obsessed} drive to finish exterior painting projects before cold weather sets in. For example, I oversleep work, get to the office with just an hour left to edit and paginate wire pages. And then I discover they’ve moved the office, so I’m running through a building, up the stairs, opening doors, hoping to find the terminals and colleagues. (Recent Virtual Earth searches suggest the Review-Times building has been demolished and moved into the smaller addition; also, our quarters on Leonard Springs Road have been leveled, for a McMansion.)

Other dreams where I’m simply racing something, whatever …

WE’RE TOGETHER ON AN OLD FARM, one with a huge barn. We’re buying it. I say, “In New England, we build a woodshed connecting the house and barn.”

We enter and it’s a banquet hall, where she stands apart with a group of girlfriends. Sees a fire door and opens it. The alarm doesn’t go off. Instead, she’s in an anteroom, facing another door.

Told of the dream, she replies, “That’s good! I wasn’t afraid to open it.”

 

SHE’S WITH A NUMBER OF FORMER boyfriends and lovers, but knows it isn’t really them but someone else; each time, one would strip off his face like a mask. In time she identified the Lover as me, not by my face but by my HANDS.

 

AT THE MOTEL, I’M FLIRTING with two or three women. Maybe more?

As they pass each other, there’s friendship, not jealousy.

I’m supposed to run one – a newer one – to the airport, but each time I go out to the car, something else is missing from the dashboard. Speedometer, clock, etc. Stolen, stripped out overnight, while we slept. Not the hubcaps or battery, but the interior – controls – until I cannot drive anywhere.

 

I’m living in an apartment complex, at first something like the townhouses atop the hill, morphing into something more like the garden apartments with a central parking lot outside Baltimore.

We’re moving out or at least cleaning up, carrying stuff out to the dumpster.

I’m not sure who the “us” is, but soon it feels like just me, especially when body parts or something suspicious is found, say, under the front-door mat and then in strange corners within the house. Gotta clean ’em out before they start stinkin’. Into the dumpster, then, when nobody’s looking.

Early on, I’m trying to protect the chil’kins, not that I/we think she’s done anything but rather that she would be a prime suspect.

As this progresses, though, it’s my ex- who’s in question. For whatever reason, I’m still trying to help her, cover for her.

In either case, I’d be under heightened suspicion.

“I’VE NEVER BEEN TOUCHED,” meaning love.

“My sisters have. They all have husbands and family, but I’ve never been touched.”

 

TRAVELING IN A TERRAIN LIKE the orchard country of Washington state – Naches or Cowiche, especially – in the car, we come across the top of a hill and find ourselves facing a band of four tornadoes, which we manage to drive past, after great fear and trepidation.

She’s no longer a goddess, but a traveling companion. Do the tornadoes reflect engulfing, destructive, and self-destructive figures of love?

 

ON A BOAT, THE RUDDER WORKS in the opposite direction of what feels right. Often seemed to have no effect, whatsoever.

In both cases, a sense of something important remaining unfinished.

AT AN EVENING EVENT, not especially Quaker. Maybe I’m off on a book tour or readings. Whatever, I’m in an amber-lighted room with others and eventually realize she’s on the other side. We eventually approach, exchange a few words. Hesitantly, I ask if she’d be interested in a late dinner, and just as cautiously, she replies in a muted affirmative.

We go to a small, upscale, modernistic place – again, soft lighting. The service, however, is atrocious. It’s late, they have my credit card, and the food just doesn’t come. We don’t know what to do. We’re hungry. Demand the card and leave?

The waiter, apologetic, finally shows up with my card. We stay, I assume.

This was disturbing enough to wake me two hours earlier than I’d planned to get up. Was jarring enough I couldn’t go back to sleep.

 

IT STARTS OUT WITH THE KISS, I presume. And somehow leaps from the chemist to her, who now wants to travel with me on a journey. We’re at yearly meeting, after agreeing to coffee or late dinner to talk things over and perhaps catch up. Maybe she invited herself to my room after. What I remember is the intensity of her snuggling up to me, seductively tender, cooing, yielding.

 

FLASH IN THE BIG, MULTILEVEL MALL: much taller, but definitely the type: intense blue eyes, freckles, full and almost purple lips, golden-blonde hair. The constant potential around the corner, the unexpected encounter of some intense part of my past: someone I loved powerfully or served who nonetheless betrayed me.

 

HER WANTING to reunite with me.

I wasn’t having it.

Not after this long.

 

FLYING UNDER BLANKETS (sheets? or Navajo blankets?) with Photographer over mountains (starting out from Selah or Naches?) we wind up, after rocky and snowy stretches, Goat Rocks, say, over Vermont, other end of the country – a children’s camp, actually, high up a dirt road from a dream a few nights earlier …

Freeform with or wearing a harness, hands free, touch of Yakima, touch of New England.

 

I’M GOING TO BE BURIED TOMORROW so go out with my friends or family on a sunny spring day, actually, that’s where it starts, on the country highway, looking up the intense green grass toward a plateau or leveling, with tombstones white in the sun … we climb and there see three new holes dug in the earth. One would be mine the next day.

Am I being buried alive?

 

DRIVING ALONG FLAT FARMLAND, like that of northwest Ohio. Great blue sky. Humming along, with a ditch full of water to my right; may be a small river. A small town looms on the horizon, with an elevated green bridge in front of it. First, it’s an interstate highway, and then a railroad. My companion and I discuss the possibilities ahead.

Pass under it and there’s a forced right turn. Everything turns dark and interior. (Hmm. Shades of the water-cage highway weeks earlier.) I overhear a young woman telling of a dream in which she, too, had a prominent bridge. I approach her, ask if her bridge was perpendicular to the highway, as mine was. No, it was beside it. Still, we’ve bridged a conversation. She’s wearing a black cocktail dress. Smiles slyly, seductively. We begin kissing. It’s only a momentary thing, one of us says.

So here’s a dream with conversations about dreams! Again, a sense of places I’ve lived, back when.

SITTING IN AN AUDIENCE, AWAITING the speaker, when a woman comes out to introduce the guest lecturer, I hear the name but get up and leave.

Hearing of my move, my therapist shouts his approval.

 

AT A CONTRADANCE BEING HELD IN A HOME … a place with multiple rooms … everyone knows me as a friend, at least the regulars. I hear that she’s also there, in another room. But this time, she’s trying to catch up with me as I circulate – and she never succeeds. A role reversal.

 

SHE COMES TO ME TO RECONCILE, but when we’re naked abed, I put my head into her loose essence – and push her away with such force it awakens me at 5 a.m.

Head? Not hand?

 

BECAUSE OF SOME ACCIDENT, has a porcelain face but her own lips. We must swim to the cove to get my car (somehow, the vital papers in my wallet do not get wet).

 

A SHADOW BRUNETTE IN HER DWELLING – very sexy, serious, freckled, long hair and a white peasant blouse – fleets through. She informs me the goddess had a ride lined up to Dallas (presumably her regular lover) but backed out when she heard I was coming, would be there … cancelled because she wanted to “square things off with you.”

Facing each other again, her kisses are conflicted, broken off as if she might want to return. Even so, a distance and brooding.

Of course, I was the one who was driving to her place.

 

A FIGURE – LONG FLAXEN HAIR – walks past the clump of people I’m hanging out with.

“Who was that?” a young woman says to me.

“Oh, just somebody I used to love. Used to love very much.”

STAYING IN A VERY POSH HOTEL in Washington, D.C., where one exterior was angled so the rooms opened out on a large waterslide! I’m torn in making a decision between going to the National Gallery, a block down the street, or playing in the water instead.

The deal also includes a helicopter ride over downtown Dayton, just a few blocks away.

Obligations/seriousness versus fun/irresponsibility.

 

IN COASTAL FRANCE, RIDING IN a horse-drawn carriage, our guide leaves and I’m expected to pay the driver but I haven’t converted my currency. At last, I say MO-NAY and point to the dollars in my wallet. He laughs and points to a shoreside bank. We enter together, take an elevator down from street level, toward the water, I presume.

 

DRIVING WITH JAMES DOBSON THROUGH rich, plowed farmland – gently rolling, like southern Indiana – but also about to be turned into housing tracts.

We need to take a leak, so we park and climb a small green rise, and at the fence line while taking our pee, I gaze out on a sunny morning pond and see what I think’s an otter. “Look!” As we focus, we realize it’s a brown bear and its companion.

 

THIS TIME, WITH BLONDIE, BEGINS roadside Bucks Co. PA scene from an earlier HODGSON roots quest dream. Soon, however, we are interior, getting intimate – walls, ceiling painted black. We’re interrupted by “Annie,” who has me tied up, ready to be shipped out with burlap bags (of pot?) and recipes for its use. My head is against strange paperback drawings of couples with bizarre tats and piercings. At last Blondie senses Annie, having spaced off somewhere else, has forgotten, for now, unties me. “You’ve got to go, now,” coins falling from my pockets all over the dark place. Me, in overalls! No time to chase the coins. “You’ve got to go. NOW!” Expelling me out onto a downtown, then my high school, Watervliet, daylight, all from other recent nights. She cannot come along. Held hostage, by her kids.