More busy dreams, this time with me trying to get on foot through midtown New York. The sidewalks were mysteriously chopped up and uneven, smashed into jagged shards that tilted this way and that. I made my way along but had the indignity of watching a broad-shouldered yuppie gallop ahead in his suit.
Then the dream changed gears and I was on the edge of a limitless grassy plain, quite a pleasant place. I was with a group of people with some sort of interest in my well-being, and when their attention was off me I decided to fill in a quiet moment by running along a broad trail leading to the horizon. I found I could add length after length and finally I arrived at some installation at the edge of nowhere. It was a sleek, well-ordered place, gray on the outside, dim on the inside but in a comfortable way. Broad windows showed the plain still retreating and a pale blue sky going beyond sight. Reception desk, gift shop, no one around but a woman behind the desk. She explained this was a community of girls, which seemed promising, but then I woke up.
Such an overheated jumble, this dream involved bright sunlight and life on some imaginary college campus I've never been to. I was wending from one tight corridor and warren of rooms to another, with the walls done up as lumpy white stucco. All very tiresome.
Last night: I was walking along an upward-sloping highway. Nighttime, no shoes. I had to get to a city in northern New Jersey, so I figured I'd take a plane. I didn't know how far off the airport was, but I had a direction to head in. And then I hit a remarkable run of luck. The airport was just over the next ridge, I somehow acquired a beat-up pair of shoes after boosting myself into the airport's swimming pool area, I still had my bookbag with ATM card, and after some wandering about the airport’s giant compound I found the ticket sellers. But, as happens in dreams, details that seem quite secure can turn out to be undefined, and I realized that the only name I could think of for my destination, for that town in New Jersey, was Hyannisport. But one realizes this sort of thing as one is waking up, and that was the case here. So I guess the dream had a happy ending after all.
Stoppard Corner. The now late genius of English theater has been quoted many times in the past few days. Tom Stoppard generated aphorisms, but here’s something beyond aphorism. From Jumpers (1972), the cri de coeur of a professor of moral philosophy tortured by the suspicion that God exists: “All I know is that I think that I know that I know that nothing can be created out of nothing, that my moral conscience is different from the rules of my tribe, and that there is more in me than meets the microscope—and because of that I’m lumbered with this incredible, indescribable, and definitely shifty God, the trump card of atheism.”