In Dreams

Since yesterday was a long, trying day--in fact, this whole month has been something to be quickly and gratefully forgotten--I ate a brief, hastily prepared dinner upon my arrival at La Casa del Terror, watched a little bit of television and, at 8 p.m., gave up on the day and crawed off to bed.

If only the day ended there.

Somebody once said, "No one has more tortured dreams than the creative mind." (That someone may have been me, but I'm certain somebody else has said the very same thing, only more eloquently.) And when I have a lot on my mind--sometimes good, but usually (like yesterday) bad--I tend to have more detailed, intricate or flat-out weird dreams.

Last night (or was it this morning?) fell into that last category.

I don't remember all of it--a dream has to be really vivid or really freaky (or both) for me to retain the whole thing upon awakening--but the jist, as I recall, was this:

I was to attend a memorial reading for Lorri Jackson and compose a poem for the event. (Why I'd need attend--since she's been dead for 17 years--and write a tribute poem when I wrote one back then, I don't know.)

I arrive with JB at what I think is a meeting to discuss the memorial, take a seat on a folding chair in what looks like an American Legion hall and start to write lines in a spiral-bound notebook. (The only fragment I can recall from the verse-in-progress is "cancerous traffic"--which I actually rather like; maybe I'll use in a poem or haiku somewhere down the line.) Then somebody tells me that this isn't a meeting to discuss the memorial--this is the memorial.

Panic is setting in rapidly when a short man wearing a bowling shirt and jeans approaches me, lays his small, soft hands upon my troubled shoulders and urges me calm down and have a seat. I recognize him imediately, even without the "flowing robes" Carl the groundskeeper so eloquently described in Caddyshack, as the Dalai Lama. He directs my attention to the stage, where a Lorri Jackson lookalike is doing a vigorous dance. She's a dead ringer for Lorri, with many colorful tattoos and piercings shining in the stage lights...except she was naked...and had a fully erect dick.

When the Dalai Lama himself takes the stage to say a few kind words, the audience breaks out into an apparently well-rehearsed song-and-dance routine in tribute to him. I don't know the words or moves, so I look at the young man on my left--a blond kid in a crisp white shirt and tie, like the kind you see going door to door on Saturday afternoons, asking you whether or not you've accepted Jesus as your personal savior--and just do what he does, only maybe a beat or two behind.

When the number ends, the Dalai Lama begins to speak...at which point I wake up and vow never, ever to eat turkey chili right before bedtime.