The sleepy plan worked perfectly and I slept from 11 last night until 7 this morning; good news. But …

This scenario is fertile for dreaming. I sank down.

The house was this house with a few differences. One, it was crowded with family as in olden times, doing things like wiping down my fridge inside and out and asking me a lot of questions about this, and that. Two, there were no near neighbors–many of the lots around were empty ground.

I stepped outside and realized that someone was stacking freight in the adjacent lot, and it was spilling right onto my driveway. I walked up the hill toward the warehouse, a little annoyed and willing to rumble.

But it wasn’t some cantankerous old fuck like me. It was a young woman in her twenties, and … well, she didn’t really know what she was about. She could drive a forklift alright, and somebody was paying her to come here and do it all alone. But the plan of what was going where and why made no sense at all.

It was already her quitting time, getting toward dark, and she still had a fifty-mile drive back to where her apartment was.

She said her name was Maybe. She stood too close to me like in the song by the Police and she seemed to have no shyness at all about that. I liked it more than I wanted to. I touched her back.

So just in case you’re my wife, or someone who’d watch over me on my wife’s behalf, keep in mind the dictum: Everyone you meet in a dream is an aspect of yourself. So I’m forgiven out of hand, because the shivery touches were technically autoerotic rather than cheating, and I mean anyway c’mon, they were only touches, and not one stitch or shirt came off. I’m good, I tell you.

It became apparent that I was going to get dragged into helping her do her job if I didn’t want shit blocking my driveway, and that even past that, it would be hard to let her go off driving up the mountain in the dark, so she’d probably be sleeping here too. In the back of my mind I knew that was going to fly like a lead cessna with everyone at the house, but really, what could I do about that? I started moving stuff.

In any event that plotline got subsumed in meeting other aspects of myself, including a guy who had too many guns and a Jeep with three wheels and the fourth hub up on a block–a temporarily crippled guy in both the moral and interstate senses, but that’s all less important to where this is going.

The point is that this twentysomething woman named Maybe, with the absurd job and bad economic and geographical issues, this forklift femme who stands too close and thrills me when she does, is an angle onto me. She is me. Not all of me. But definitely part, and her apartment where she usually sleeps lives down the state route out on one of the X chromosomes.

If I ever really do finish a novel, I think that novel will start this way, with a dream like this pointing the way.

I also think it should, because there’s not going to be any way that I know of to just slap down the story I need to tell in naked prose, and I don’t think anyone would get much out of it even if I did.

I’ve done fiction and I can do fiction, but I never have on any epic scale and the thought of not having done it has some dread associated with it, but not as much dread as trying to say it all straight out in some kind of non-fiction voice, if such a thing as nonfiction

even exists.