I don’t do this often. Bear with me, OMFB. The first thing I remember was being held against my will in some bizarre religious culty thing (RDC is reading Jon Krakauer’s new book Under the Banner of Heaven, about a murder in a Mormon context). In my small bedchamber, a persistent swain pressed his suit in the most unwelcome self-assured courtship since Mr. Collins’s of Elizabeth Bennet. (After her volunteer vacation in Togo three years ago, Egg received the most hysterical postcard from an utter stranger who must have got her name and address from another Togolese, with a cut-out three-quarter photograph glued on, trying to woo her, saying something about how even though he didn’t meet her he experienced the beautiful scent wafting in her wake. She is in western African this week for work and I enthused with her just before she left that maybe she could meet him this time.) The next day, as I knew it in the dream, I had escaped, and I had a newborn (it was Blake's hatchday Monday). There was no coitus, no pregnancy, no birth, but I knew it was mine. I wanted to be rid of it before it needed to eat because I was afraid if I nursed it, I would bond with it. Here are the ways it was like Blake: it moseyed about (and, unlike Blake, nearly fell down the cellar stairs), it was kind of toilet trained (one mosey was to poop somewhere that wasn't-on-me), and it kind of talked (like Blake, but more like the cat in Half Magic). It could do all this despite being merely a day old, and I liked it and told it how brilliant it was. It was a girl and I thought I might name it Emily but then I would reprimand myself that the sunflower was Emily (I had a sunflower yesterday). I wound up in a house belonging to a woman who looked like Chloris Leachman (we watched “Interiors” last night and apparently Geraldine Page reminds me of Chloris Leachman). I finally nursed it when it needed to be fed. While it fed, I realized, “Hey, I'm on the pill! That must be bad for the baby.” Following rapidly on the heels of that brilliance was “Yeah! I'm on the pill! I can't have a baby.” Whereupon I woke up.
With, interestingly, neither horror nor relief nor longing but disorientation and then amusement.
A while ago I bought a pen with a light in the tip so you can write in the nearly dark. I have never used it in my paper journal because, as my sister says, if it's not violet, it's not recognizably my handwriting. I woke, I pulled my journal from my backpack (which lives by my bed) and the pen from the drawer, and wrote four pages.