By
Edward Williams
Copyright
1999
-1-
"What kind of a hotel is
this? There's a dining room, but half the people at the tables have
nothing in front of them. They're just sitting there like condemned.
They bring you a menu and it only has one thing on it. Like, swordfish."
"I wouldn't even call that
a menu. It's more of an announcement."
"It makes you wonder why
there were so many choices at the restaurants of old. Back in life."
"Well do I remember that
dream in which the other woman was my wife. I was leading this double
life, and I was married and had this other woman, and I woke up in
a panic and actually checked to see that the woman I was with was
the other woman - my wife in real life."
"Who was the dream wife?"
"You had an affair with your
wife? In a dream? What rubbish!"
"I remember once I woke up
and I was lying on the bottom of a rowboat."
"At least it isn't waffles."
"What say that?"
"I can't get a focus on her;
as soon as I wake up she disintegrates so rapidly I have no information
about her anymore."
"Is this one of those repeating
dreams."
"Or artichoke hearts! God
how I hated those! Hope there aren't any of those around."
"Let's consider all dainty
items of food."
"I was nibbling her ears!"
"Luckily it still had oars,
and I was able to get out of the marsh and back onto the lake. Eventually
my memory came back."
"That sounds like it's from
a movie. You probably suffered a movie transfusion dream. You won't
be having any more of those now."
"I hardly have any other
type than repeating - all my dreams are episodes now from an already
well established situation, which only happens in dreams - the only
access I have. . ."
"Like the one in the old
house. Where you eternally fitfully ramble between floors, and sometimes
find that secret stairway? Sometimes that long room where there are
experiments set out with . . . Tinkertoys and stuff. That--"
"How did you know?"
"Because that is a stock
dream. Everybody has it. Or most people. Or one small percentage of
people chosen to be infiltrators because of their . . ."
"Don't reveal too much! The
anathestic might not be worn off."
"One night I was at my computer,
it was really late, early in the morning, and I had the ashtray on
a chair next to me, I put my hat over the ashtray and, guess what,
my hat caught on fire!"
"Fire when ready, Gridley!"
"Who is that old man walking
in a stately swinging gate on the old country road in . . . it must
be England?"
"Why Wordsworth of course."
"He isn't that old you know.
And if it looks like he is talking to himself it is because he isn't
crazy but composing his poem. He gets the rhythm from the walking,
one imagines. He gets back to the cottage with quatrain after quatrain
memorized."
"My writing methods are very
different. I'm more like a kid on a bicycle, who goes faster and faster
and crashes in the driveway for lack of brakes."
