A Personal Note.

I am dreaming more than I used to. I used to sleep more than I do now but, lately, more and more of my snatches of sleep end in near waking dreams and my dreams more often than not are of ones I knew years ago and have not seen or heard from in a long time. I never recall on waking many of the details of my dreams. I only have impressions of them. I dreamed one recent morning of an old friend. She visited me, it would seem, but we weren't here or anywhere together we'd ever been with one another and she took me to meet friends of hers none of whom I knew or liked much. She lives very far from here, if at any anymore, and in places I have never been or am likely to ever visit. So, perhaps, then, that particular part of the dream makes some sense. After waking, of course, my most explicit memory of the dream was of the moments just before it ended with my waking in my chair. It ended with my running away out into a cold but vivid and spectacular dawn in yet another strange-t0-me landscape. A train with lights on was darkly arriving at a station yard before that enormous red and blue day break sky. I needed to get home and was desparate for her to tell me how. I was angry that she wouldn't. This morning I dreamed I was with family. Most of my nearest relations were on hand at the end but I can only recall specifically my step-father, my mother and my grandmother all of whom are gone now. Once, again, I was going off at the end of my dream but ony to smoke in secret a cigar. They were all aware of my purpose but were nice enough to let me keep my secret. In the dream there were conversations I overheard and in some I participated from time to time but I don't recall anything that was said or anything of what was being discussed. I only know, now, that, though, in the dream, I knew what was being said and what it was about, our words had no voices. Perhaps that dream feature, too, is appropriate. All the people who spoke to me and around me I'll never hear speak again and I can not communicate with them now except in dreams. Here, where I'm living now, much of my time is spent observing and contemplating the differences between those of us who are old and those who are young and how we live and are in the world in our different ways. One thing I can say on that subject, I now realize, is that the old have more lost friends and dead than those who are young and we are more haunted.