A rather elaborate sequence of dreams after drafting a letter to our former landlords. I had fallen asleep especially early, around 8 p.m., and this was kicking in probably around 4 a.m. and continuing until 6:

I’m in Yakima (actually had an elaborate “east of Yakima” dream about six months ago, heading through the small towns off toward Tri-Cities … no trace of its content now). Except that this one could as easily be Binghamton or even Manchester.

It picks up as we’re coming over the crest of a high hill overlooking the city. We’re on a clean concrete boulevard on a sunny day, the downtown arrayed below us – and golden hillsides overlooking it from the other side. Blue sparkling river flows through it. (Columbia River, as it is up in Wenatchee?) We’re chatting about my return visit after so long.

Actually, I now remember there was an earlier episode about taking my family out West … spurred by the letter, actually … so they become part of the crowd in this series, even when they’re masked as others, I suppose. In actually, it’s a golden morning after a very glum Sunday.

It’s a smooth sweep downhill, skirting the downtown. We’re talking about a movie that was done here. (Maybe even picking up on another recent dream of visiting Ivar’s orchard, which in reality could have been in York County as easily as Washington State.)

Next thing I know is we’re driving along the sparkling blue river. From the angle of the sunlight, we must have been headed east. The freeway is in a set of elaborate caging – wiring like extended lobster pots, actually – sprinkled by a earlier shower perhaps or occasional irrigation. A vast serpentine structure along the river and overhead – was the other side cliff? “They haven’t done a movie with this yet, have they?” Laughter. And our guide (Phyllis?) replying, “Not yet.” It was very cinematic and joyful.

We pull off at a small mill area … like those of New England. (I now remember yet another recent dream, of what I pegged as eastern Ohio or even West Virginia: driving along an industrial valley, leaving the freeway and visiting within the varied small cities. Many shades of Warren, Niles, Youngstown, with moats thrown in. Maybe this dream repeatedly. Trying to reconnect with something lost.) We park and walk past or through a small Catholic church and out on a shaded plaza beside a mill. In the window, I see someone sitting. Looks like Carl P., only turning to face us, is a woman. Not pleased by our banter, either. We start to borrow a picnic table bench to use elsewhere, then I turn around and replace it. Glancing down the street beside the church, I notice that what first appeared to be triple-deckers beside the mill are actually one long, complex series of stucco apartments with Roman Catholic crosses in strategic places.

I think we had been visiting in one of the apartments … a rather erotic introduction for me … though it’s all fuzzy now. Again, later vague memories of other apartment dreams and student-residents. Colleges or art schools. Maybe Cincinnati and theaters or music.

We exit through the church, and dash across the street to a parking lot – all set high above the river, like the Sam Hill museum and Stonehenge in the Horse Heaven Hills. The headlights of a procession approach – either a wedding or, as it turns out, a funeral. Now off to the side, we watch two groups in conflict – the funeral contingent above, with the hearse, and a group taunting and jeering below. Some kind of minor thug – a woman? – is to be buried after a funeral mass.

But first, we’re off. Somehow, our own crowd has changed. It’s more crowded, and Phyllis must be driving. A teenage orphan is snuggled up next to me and several others. (It’s getting very erotic.) She’s freckled, open-faced, and has somehow managed to live on her own – a victim of the thug’s oppression. A blanket’s thrown over us. I reach down to scratch my leg (I’m wearing shorts) but am scolded for touching someone else. Lift the blanket, and a face looks up at us. “Sorry. I’ll keep my hands up here, to myself.” Laughter. There are other bodies pressed in against us, too. It’s a crowded, but joyful trip.

Turns out this is part of a group that sees this as the moment of liberation from the thug’s circle.

A leap again, and we’ve stopped at a small roadside restaurant called, it turns out, Baklava’s. Looks like a Carvel’s or Baskin-Robbins. We’re running around in some confusion. I see bagels for sale, but not what I’m seeking. (Something big and fluffy, like a cinnamon roll, or even baklava.) “Oh, the coffee comes with baklava,” I’m told, and yes, the coffee is dark and thick.

After I get my order, one of our companions (not Phyllis?) goes up to the counter, where the manager (I presume) in a red-plaid shirt is at the counter. She squirts him with a fountain pen-turned-hypodermic, hitting him with a dark liquid. He falls over backward. He was one of the thugs and we’ve made our hit. We run from the store and no one pursues us to the parking lot. Good thing, since my car keys are tangled in my pocket. (So I’m driving now?) Even with the delay, there’s no sensation of panic. We’re on the side of justice, however illicit. The people’s side. Justice has been served. It’s still morning.

LIVING AGAIN IN AN OLD LIMESTONE dorm, had a room in each of two or three buildings, under the pretense of opening some kind of retail store in all but one. For some reason, though, none of the doors would lock; or if they were locked, they wouldn’t hold. Anybody could push in. I was greatly annoyed – after all, I couldn’t be everywhere at once; besides, I had to be away for classes and the library, too, even though nobody actually broke in.

On the way back to one of the dorms, I saw a two-story building that had smoke rolling out of its windows – “Oh, no! It’s the firehouse!” – and then bright flames licked from the structure.

Poetic justice, perhaps, more than alarm – and relief wasn’t our building.

OUR building?

 

I RETURN TO MY APARTMENT, which is at the bottom of a staircase in a carpeted basement. The apartment is essentially one room, with the door in the corner and a panel of windows along the hallway – a commercial feel to it, like a small store. But as I approach with a friend, we realize the door is agape – and everything has been cleaned out, except for my violin case and same papers atop the closet. Somehow, I’m not disturbed by all the loss.

This leaps to something from another set of dreams, the door latch that will not lock – which has been the case in this apartment. “They” finally got me, and that’s it. Except it’s somehow also liberating.

This came the morning after our trip to IKEA, with all of its designer small-scale apartments, and my unexpected surge of feelings of poverty no doubt arising from my sudden “retirement” with its accompanying issues of finances that still need to be addressed. So who was with me? You? Even so, I felt insured … and that all my creative work and notes could be recovered. That, before clothing and kitchen ware!

THE BELLE-ETTE AND HER HUSBAND are hosting a party at the old Cape across the street. The lovely A twins are seducing me, or seduced. I never could tell them apart.

We go to an upstairs bed, entwine in evening rain.

Out the window we view an incredible forest that had always been hidden by the houses on our street. (Oakdale and Ashland are, after all, forest names.)

A good-sized stream runs in a valley, and a waterfall back there, though this is a big-city neighborhood.

The nearest house, out beyond that (the dairy, in reality, where those falls would be – has in reality been sold and is out of business). The woods, dense as Jay Lower’s, whose land probably triggered this.

The idea of a forest in that yard now amazes.

There were only the two ash trees in front, and the towering cottonwood behind.

All roped in by a slew of utility wires.

 

A MAILBOX, LIKE MY CHILDHOOD home’s. I see a big brown envelope to me (yellow slip attached), even though the mailman hasn’t made today’s rounds yet. (What was his name, Mister …)

There’s a pink envelope waiting at the bungalow across the street. Above and behind the milk box, I find a whole bunch of mail to me.

 

CAMPING IN THE BACKYARD – no tent – when the phone rings, very muffled, as if within a potholder – when I find it and answer, there’s a warning of a coming storm. At last, in the northeast sky, I see it, the tornado – which turns and comes toward me, veering toward the neighbors’ garage – IT SCARES ME AWAKE, even as I realize it’s traveling backward, toward the southwest. (Contrary to science.)

A GRAY DAY IN A GRAY DOWNTOWN where I’m apparently accepting a new job or making a big sale, establishing a relationship with a new client, a major newspaper. There are perks, including coupons or trade-outs for dining at fancy restaurants, where I’m encouraged to venture.

That afternoon, in one, the owner leads me to a happy alcove and introduces me to Colin Powell and his wife, both in matching Hawaiian shirts. Insisting I join them at their table for martinis, they then herald another couple, greeting them warmly. When the drinks arrive, we clink glasses merrily – so skillfully, in fact, we look out to see ourselves receiving a standing ovation. The retired general and secretary of state ars quite sociable and at ease, very warm and effusive. We don’t discuss politics.

In this episode, my name’s Luther.

WE’RE UNDER STADIUM BLEACHERS, assisting with a college graduation.

The girls walk two-by-two from the dark interior out across a bridge over a stream into the stands where they’ll sit. Only half wear white gowns (with mortar boards) – the rest, red shorts, yellow skirts, white patterned blouses, etc.

As for the boys, where presumable I am?

Somebody helps a girl in wheelchair to the bridge. I accompany a blind, partly blonde girl who carries a cane but can see enough to smile at me as she enters more sunlight.

Still under the stadium, I’m handed a paperclip set of credit card slips – my name hadn’t come out on some of the carbon copies after all – some of the others, just faintly.

So this is the reason I’m not graduating? Many of these charges had nothing to do with the college.

Coffee (ground?) war, the GIRL, her older brothers, and mother are graduating.

The soft package.

THE DOOR WON’T CLOSE RIGHT and he keeps opening it to wipe me out of business.

They finally blow it open in wind and spitting rain.

Kit’s a black-and-white coffee bag with a picture of me with a gorilla on the label urban grocery.

First see her in a movie or auditorium a row or two behind me and ask her to help me with this snake like a boa, and she does, admitting later she normally would have been afraid or inhibited and thus not spoken to a stranger.

WE’RE STAYING IN A MOTEL and look out. There’s a moose. No antlers yet. Leafy, forested. But also somehow urban, and somebody has to do something. Summon help. “That’s all right,” I say. Looking right, toward a swing set, when a fire truck comes into sight – emergency workers – but they crash into the swing set, can’t clear it. (I could see the collision coming.) When the truck hits, it’s no fire engine after all, but garbage. A Dumpster goes careening across and spills. A man – cowboy? – leaps from the truck cab, maybe, and lunges for the moose. Leaps through the back legs, grabs the front left – with a whoop and a holler from this truck companions. Pulls the moose over. It falls on top of him!

“Why, he’s OK,” I say to my companion.

This sequence, from my time in the Pacific Northwest, remains eerily prescient.

 

DRIVING THROUGH ALLEGHENY FORESTS “out east,” I come into a small city. At an oblique Y intersection, I veer to the right and am struck by a large three-story apartment building with stately columns and porches on the front. Not that different, really, from one on Far Hills Avenue in my past. While this intersection initially seemed like the downtown, it’s only a prelude for a real downtown a mile or so further on.

After moving back, to eastern Ohio, I went driving one day into Pennsylvania and came into Warren via a route that eerily matched the dream. The sense of déjà vu was overwhelming.

 

I’M THE GROOM IN a Quaker wedding. The event moves outdoors, under an impressive beech tree and golden pools of sunlight. In the background is a large, old house of an unfamiliar style, part of a sedate farm. The bride’s off a bit, the center of attention, somewhat blurred but with distinctive flaxen hair stretching well-beyond her waist. I’m deliriously happy – so much so, I awakened with the cry (at least in my sleep), “But I can’t be doing this! I’m already happily married!”

Later, after my first wife had left, I was traveling from North Carolina to Philadelphia and, crossing through Delaware, came upon my first three-story federal-style house that I was aware of. A few months later, I became engaged to a woman fitting the one in the dream. She was Quaker.

 

AHA! I FIND MENTION in my journals of climbing a fire tire in Allegheny National Forest and coming out into Warren, Pa., noting, “how weird! the town seems to have three downtowns (no suburban malls) and one comes to an intersection … just like a dream I had (but I didn’t meet the ‘Quaker girl.’)”

In the decades since, I relocated to a locale where such houses are common and then in a Quaker service married a woman who easily fits the dream, though her hair is less flaxen.

IN AN ARTSY VILLAGE overlooking the Ohio River, with a sprite who morphs into my sister. We view a very funny improv, not at all physically like Jackie Kennedy but the mannerisms are on target. Leaving, we encounter snakes all over the street, frogs, a boa constrictor hanging from a tree over the road. Carnival music. Our car hits a horse, and its head hangs down over the windshield. The boa’s mouth is by my window, which is open. I keep yelling, “Close the window! Close the window!”

The horse turns out to be white inflated plastic. A white horse with red rouge cheeks and green lips. A green button on the harness above the eyes. When we see that, we laugh, realizing the whole thing was artificial, a prank.

We venture off to see the rest of the film, which is playing just two more days.