Dream Log: Commercial Success as a Writer

Last night, while I was still awake, there were some noises just outside, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Then I fell asleep. I dreamed that I had suddenly become very successful, commercially, as writer. In the dream I was an adult, but I was living, by myself, in the house I lived in from the late 1960's to the mid-1970's, from age eight to fourteen, a large house with a very large front lawn. It was nighttime. Many people were coming to congratulate me. Many, who arrived in huge 1940's automobiles, identified themselves as distant cousins of mine. Typewriter copies of many things I had written pre-Internet were laying around here and there in the house, paper-clipped to handwritten comments by various people. I kept trying to read some of these comments, but the handwriting was hard to read, and I was constantly being interrupted by the many visitors.

In addition to the many visitors, many congratulatory gifts had been sent to me. The packages were piled high on the porch. I had received 300-pound

slam balls, gold and platinum watches, all sorts of hard-to-find books.

My distant cousins took me to a time machine. In real life, when I lived in this house, behind it were cornfields. In the dream, behind it was an urban residential area with narrow streets and small houses. The nearest small house was a time machine.

I went back into my house, went through a maze of hallways and stairways to reach a small room with a piano in it, with shelves on two walls crammed with sheet music. This room was crowded with people singing American songs from the early 20th century to piano accompaniment. Among these singers was Gore Vidal, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and the collar open. As soon as he saw me, Gore said, "They're going to turn you in to Langley!"

Langley, Virginia is the site of the headquarters of the CIA. Gore did not literally mean that, as soon as my distant cousins and I got to wherever we were going in the future, they were planning to hand me over to the CIA. What he meant was that these distant cousins of mine were right-wing reactionaries, and that I belonged with Leftists such as himself and the others singing in that small room.

I was going to start to try to explain to Gore that these distant cousins of mine were much more liberal than he thought, but instead I woke up.