She herd
Dreams in which I'm in the shower and suddenly realize that I should have been teaching a class for the past half a semester, I rush to the Greyhound station and by the time I get to campus it's evening and I don't even know where the class should be meeting. Dreams in which I've forgotten to take a high school class and I have to go back for a semester. The building is a maze and I don't even know what room I'm supposed to be in; I end up in the wrong class over and over without even a notebook or a pen, or I'm wandering the halls all day until the bell rings for the end of classes. Dreams in which I have to go back to my isolated little college in Vermont to take one last class; I have two master's degrees but that doesn't matter, and I'm waiting in line for my room key again. Dreams in which I have to return to college and I can't find my room. The dorm turns into a maze in which I'm trapped, I keep passing the same rooms over and over, never mine, the same living room and kitchen, I go up and down the endless stairs and all I want to do is lie down in the bed I've never seen, all my belongings are already in the room and they'll never be mine again. Dreams in which I dream about my dreams, dreams which remember other dreams: the giant cafeteria in the library in the middle of the maze-like high school, all that eating and reading together. "I dreamed about this, but it's real," I say, before I wake up.
* Dreams in which my mother isn't dead but only hiding. Her survival is a secret I mustn't tell, she's in danger otherwise. Only I can know that she's alive. I wake up so happy and then I remember. Dreams in which the black opera singer Jessye Norman slowly promenades over an elaborate stone bridge, wearing a powder-blue gown with a jeweled headdress and an enormous train billowing behind her, singing a stately, soaring aria (reminiscent of Bellini's "Casta Diva"). During the refrain an unseen chorus sings "Ah-ah, pale Gomorrah" over her extended, melismatic vocalise. She looks like some ideal version of my mother. Dreams in which I write the perfect poem, painstakingly setting down each word, but forget it when I wake up. Dreams in which I wake up and write down the poem I've just dreamed to make sure that I won't forget it, but then I wake up again and realize that I was still dreaming. Sometimes a phrase or a line lingers in my head, and it makes no sense at all. My sleep is jagged, has sharp edges. I wake as someone I've never been. 44