WEIRD DREAM

Last night, I dreamed that Kelly Link and Gavin Grant had come to visit our house for a day. We gave them breakfast and then had some errands to run and so we said we'd be right back.

For some reason, we took a short cut through the back of the house, only at the back of the house was a mansion connected to our house--like, Gormenghast big, and partly a Gothic cathedral. Huge columns. Pews in places, regular furnishings in others. Part museum part mansion part cathedral. There's even an indoor cemetery with headstones right next two a huge organ. Anyway, for some reason this place is attached to the back of our house, but we don't live there and visit but rarely.

But we're taking a short cut through it to get to wherever we need to go. Except the mansion contains parts of the world, too, so we're soon seeing blue skies and trees and a dirt road, at the end of which is another graveyard on a hill. This one is more like New Orleans--huge blocks of white stone.

At this point, Ann goes off to run her errands and I go off to run mine. I wind up in a small store with a skeleton for a proprietor buying what look like pieces of animals. But all mixed together so you really can’t tell what it is.

Then I look outside and the sun is suddenly a late afternoon sun. Somehow this little trip has taken all day and Kelly and Gavin are waiting patiently in our house.

So I start to run back toward the house, only I can’t really tell where it is because I can’t see the walls of the mansion any more. I run and run, through an ever-rising city of gravestones and sepulchers. Through trees and dirt roads. Through an area of swamp where huge saurian carnivores are locked in mortal struggle. Through a garden. Through a courtyard. Through a….and then I suddenly have a hardwood floor under my feet and Ann’s there and we’re back in the mansion part.

We rush back into the house to apologize to Kelly and Gavin for being gone so long, but they just wave it off. Kelly was writing and Gavin was gardening (?!) in the front yard all day, they said. They had a good time regardless.

But I have to explain why were late, so I take them out back into the mansion/cathedral and show them the way it opens up into the world and how there’s a graveyard right in the mansion itself.

I say to Kelly, “Isn’t this cool?”

Kelly says, “That's a story.”

I say, “Yeah, but the story here is your story, I think. I’ll take the part where you can’t see the walls anymore.”

She just smiles. Maybe I’m being presumptuous. In the dream, I feel presumptuous.

“Maybe it’s a novel,” I say.

She says, “I’ve already written three novels.”

“Where are they I say?”

She says, “Right here,” and she pulls three manuscripts out of the loam of the graveyard. “I’m just waiting for them to ripen.”

Ann and I nod. That sounds right.

Then we all go out into the wider world to find some kind of insane party we can hear going on in the distance.




Yeah, I know. Really weird. Really vivid. Mostly I remember waking up wondering what we’d had for breakfast. That’s the only part I couldn’t remember.