DREAM FRAGMENTS

The cheap all-in-one printer spits out a final page with a whir, a chug, a beep. A fainter bleep from the back of the house informs me that a load of wash is ready. The house is a soft machine that contains my life, emitting signals. I know the code, so any unfamiliar audio intrusion can be upsetting. This vigilance is now entirely up to me, since my Springer Basil seems to be deaf. He too is getting old.

After a year in the house, I began to hear random chirps. For weeks I searched, looking for crickets, for something, anything to get rid of the increasingly annoying soundscape. I told the cleaning lady, and in a frenzy of frustration, we emptied every drawer and closet in the place. We found the culprit: a bag of smoke detectors, left in the back of the linen closet by the seller, maybe the last thing he did before signing the escrow papers. They chirped laconically as each battery expired.

The pages hold my dreams, literally. Two months of dream fragments, transcriptions from scribblings in the dark, contorted words in a notebook I now keep on the nightstand. It’s gotten easier, the fragments more complete, more cinematic.

This morning I came to suddenly, the dog was making a kind of whimpering noise. This is new, eyes still closed, and I’m back into the dream. There was a couple: she was explaining how much of a gentleman I was, that I stayed focused on our work, when all she wanted to do was to have sex. I’d like to see him (that’s me) fuck my husband; it’s covered by insurance.

I drifted back into the porno dream state, a porno dream state. The yelping continued and I opened my eyes. I reached for the notebook, it’s become automatic. I switched on the halogen lamp and started to write. Isn’t it odd, I wrote. Dreaming of sex and I’m not hard?

The dream capture regimen was the result of a workshop. I take a lot of them, this one led by a feeble and chubby Jungian with rebellion in his soul; it’s what drew him to me, his social and political fervor, not this dream ideology. When I was 35, I had a dream that changed the course of my life, he had said. It was precognitive—a predictive dream, a story from deep within the universe.

I poured over the pages of dream fragments for a prediction, double-strong French roast blur-buzzing the top of my head, right above my sinuses, my drippy morning snotty head. I never used to have allergies, did I? Is this part of getting old?

Talk about your dreams, the workshop leader had suggested. So, I sent the dream fragments as an email attachment to my therapist. I loved his response, a New Yorker cartoon caption: I think it will be more relevant to our discussion for you to tell me what they mean to you. It’s our therapy dance: Ve-r-r-r-y interesting, how does it make you feel?

I focus; I grab words with a yellow highlighter pen: tribal superhero special effects strategy discussions frenzied dark blond Warren Beatty fanatical gunshot SMS competition actors big party complicated survivors’ guilt prosthetic cock and balls devices numbers paternity S&M fishermen circus Pope Pius audition Julia Child coffee protein seriously handsome.

I want to turn the pattern into a shower curtain. I want to wear the yellow words, patches all over my body, tattoos of my underworld life, a dreamscape of needles and ink.
I sneeze, suddenly, loudly. My eyes water and I grab the six sheets of paper, suddenly furious, tossing the pages onto the desk, next to a large 9 x 12 envelope. Names march above the return address. I read my own name and address, and then pull out the papers inside.

There are no dreams here; these are daylight documents, five different items. I must sign them today at my lawyer’s office -- a durable power of attorney, a advance health care directive, a authorization for use and disclosure of protected health information, a declaration of trust, and my last will and testament.

Pending death made real in an envelope. Death always pending, my eventual death, my imminent death, my death in any case. A spade becomes a spade with the end of denial, the fatuous dream of immortality, a flight from madness and terror, a from of darkness to blot out a simple fact, made so tidy and legal in the envelope in my hands.

There is no time to dream when you must plan for death.