In the wake of being back I dream well in the early evening. Two of them, at least.

In the first I was right here but not quite now. Things were a little further along. You could tell two ways. One, the piles were not quite so high. Two, I had some kind of job, and I was meeting a student and his Administration of Criminal Justice prof, a woman, here in the house. What? Right.

There were so many strange things. I got home as they were getting here, and there were laptops set up outside in that same driveway. The monsoons had started and they were getting wet. I rushed them inside. We sat on the piles randomly. There was water sheeting down every wall in the great room from ceiling to floor and it worried me, but nothing seemed to be collapsing.

She wanted to interview us both about our experiences with cops. The student had very little to say, because he was a student and young. I had, I have, a novel’s worth, and I kept starting to say it and getting stopped. She had to go to the bathroom, but there still wasn’t a proper one yet, so I had to show her how we’re doing it. I must say–she was a trooper, and I mean an implausibly accepting one.

Next.

I was in a van very like my old one, out for a spin. But the van was on autopilot and I was doing other things for like thirty miles. At some point I noticed that the road was curving hard and up into some mountains, moving too fast for them and stressing the limits of the autopilot. Then I noticed it was snowing. Then I noticed that I’d never put the headlights on. So essentially I was careening up a dirt road, one lane more or less, into a snowstorm with no lights. I was astonished that we hadn’t crashed yet, and I had no earthly idea what part of the planet I was in.

It turned out to be Hinsdale, Illinois, or somewhere quite near it. The home of what used to be known as the Hinsdale Health Museum. The home … of Valeda, who I must have known when she was brand new. She did not appear in the dream.

(A lot of things have changed there, but the changes mostly seem quite recent.)

What I saw instead of the museum was a big room that I needed to back out of manually.

It was a tricky maneuver because the big room was full of boxes, and a lot of the boxes it seemed were the same ones that make up the piles in my house right now today.

It must have gone okay because I’m there again now in the wakery.