Traveling explosions.

Through the night, I slept like a fretful thing. The rain started to fall sometime in deepest dark; I think I woke to it three, maybe four times. After the second of these awakenings, around 5 a.m., I thought I was awake for good. The last time I had that experience was during the summer of my dissertation, when I awoke in a situation that I had, in that instant of awakening, outgrown. That morning, I crept out to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, watched the blue backyard, and then wrote, wrote my heart out, wrote my heart, wrote my way to my new life.

Today, I did sleep again after 5 a.m.

In my dream, I encountered two celebrities who recently had a child that no one has yet seen; we were in the living room of my high school best friend's house when I asked this famous purported mother about her child. "We're getting a divorce," she whispered to me. Later, I drove my car through a rural place a bit like the roads east of Gambier. No one else was around. As I drove, there was suddenly an explosion and an enormous plume of black smoke beside a farmhouse at the left side of the road. The house's dilapidated barn caught fire. I pulled my car off into the hayfield at the right side of the road--or so I thought; when I returned to it a few minutes later, it was still in the middle of the rural highway I'd been traveling--and ran to find someone who could help. No one could help. I gave up and fled the scene. I spent the rest of the dream--even the part where I went to the strange bar/bowling alley and walked between some children and their horseshoe game's target; even the part where I went to the vintage store and found it staffed by a whole group of people vaguely my own age who seemed interesting but away from whom I walked instantly--wandering, fearful of the police, fearful that I'd be implicated in what had blown up. I should note that when I returned to my car after the abortive attempt to find help right after the explosion, I discovered that several other houses near that stretch of road had also been burned. I should note that the art house movie theater that I discovered in the same town with the vintage store and the bar/bowling alley was showing Paradise Regained.

I should note that the rural vistas in my dream were the very stuff of hopeless beauty and implacable longing.

I should note that, despite my dream, I managed to get a couple more hours of sleep but that I've now given it up.