These dreams go on when I close my eyes.

(You get nine bonus points, maybe even ten, if you can name that allusion. Here's another hint: every second of the night, I live another life. If you needed the hint, you only get seven points.)


In my dream, the students were organizing a concert, but to get there we had to walk a long ways, through the collection of buildings that seem to recur as an alternate college in my mind, and then over the bridge near the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge of my adolescence. We walked over a swollen river, through a storm that had just ended. I had carried with me eight pairs of earrings, most of them plain silver hoops of many sizes, all of them hooked together into their pairs. Two pairs were new, and lovely, and I had just received them as gifts from my family and from my excellent friend who buys me jewelry occasionally, always choosing impeccably. One of the new pairs: silver hoops, but exquisite. The other: delicately strong gold, with red cord. When we got where we were going, I had lost the earrings, all but the ones I was wearing. The whole way back, I searched and searched for what had vanished. I found a few pairs of hoops, near the river (still swollen), but another storm had raged through and obliterated our tracks, and I am no good at finding small things among pebbles, though I am a finder of lost things, I with my connection to Saint Anthony. Later, in a suburban house in a subdivision like my parents', the students were organizing something else, but I was still searching for my earrings (and here's where I figured out that we'd started from this subdivision earlier in the dream). And then it transpired that I had lost my shoes as well. And then I awoke. And now I am missing the rest of the dream, which might be a mercy since it was shot through with so much frivolous loss, with which no one could sympathize, quite rightly.