Girl with dog and torch

I’m recovering from it.  I’ve had the longest, strangest dreams.  I dreamt an entire college class, with syllabus, and short fiction reading, and everything.

First I was late for it.  Then I arrived, in pajamas, but syllabus and handout in hand.  Wooden desks, the kind without a full desktop, just the side.  Schools that use these have one “lefty” version per room, where the desk curves around from the left-hand side instead.  I had a standard version in my dream; the desks were in a circle, the professor–Rob Cobb–was already seated.  The class was on Southern [American] fiction (exactly the kind of class I would like to take.)

I tried to apologize to the professor for missing so many classes, I opened my colorful folder (contrasting colors inside from outside) and pulled out my reading.  I began to read–I was reading part of the short story and it was good.  My lucid mind said, “Remember this story, this sentence; you can write it when you wake up, and it will be like discovering a new story.”

Then, as dreams will, a flood began to happen, and I wasn’t in the classroom, I was in an old rickety house, on an old bed, holding my story but in a brand new location.  And I can’t remember anything after that.

I don’t remember any of the story I was reading.  How fantastical was it that my mind would create a piece of fiction for me to read from, in my mind?  How sad is it that I can’t remember it at all?

Once, coming back from Haiti, my dear friend K. got really, gravely ill, and we thought she had malaria.  Her fevers and fever-dreams were incredible.  We were worried, but she said, “At least I can do good writing when the malaria comes.”  As if she was Hemingway, or some writer stricken with the kinds of fevers that bring genius.