A HORRID DREAM

We are at some ghastly, boring, pretentious convention. I have not been able to find a seat--they all seem to be reserved. I don't want to listen to this stuff anyway. It seems that we have brought George, and I am anxious to know where he is. I find him playing by himself in the hotel lobby, dashing in and out of the big front doors. It seems dangerous to me, I don't want him running out into the street in front of traffic. But when I try to call him, it has the opposite effect: he just runs the other way, full tilt into the street. He escapes one car as it speeds past, but the next one runs clear over him--a big van. Poor George doesn't have a chance. I know he's dead when I see that his head is separated from his body and goes bouncing off.

I scream, "Oh, no! Oh, no!" Then I run back to the hotel to look for Ellie. I have to break the news to her. She's at one of the meetings. I cup my hands and gaze in through the window--the glass is frosted, so I can see clearly--my face in full Munch scream. I run to the next window. but I still can't see her. Back at the front steps to the hotel I notice that George's body has already disappeared, and a kindly doorman tells me he picked up the remains from the street because "you wouldn't want to see him like that." I find Ellie, still completely innocent of what happened...

It was good to find George still with us on the bed, on waking, his head still attached to his body. It was strange, though, how hard it was to emerge from the reality of the dream, back into the reality of George's living, breathing presence. My mind was so powerfully engaged in what I had been dreaming, it took me a good few minutes of anguish before coming back to my senses. A useful insight into how it becomes engaged in other "realities" it creates--and refuses to let them go even when they prove false.

So, dream experts, help me. I'm just back from that convention in New York, but that was not ghastly, boring, or pretentious. I did not feel excluded, as I did apparently in the dream. I was also, the week before, at the College Art Association conference in Los Angeles. Am I sacrificing something important, perhaps, by devoting so much time and energy to promoting the existing books, rather than engaging in new writing? What do you think?