March 13, 2008
From the Comments
Every now and then I have a murder dream (again, more of a genre than a recurrer). For example, I had to beat a man to death, right in front of Russ & Daughters on Houston Street, in the middle of the day, using a big hunk of metal on the end of a chain. I don’t know why. And I had to kill a cat once. And gigantic bugs—like, a cockroach the size of my entire sink—and rats. It always takes a long time; my victims don’t just fall down, the way they do in movies. Murder dreams are pretty upsetting, but fortunately I don’t have them very often. Less upsetting, oddly, are the dreams in which I’m the one who gets killed—I get shot, I fall off a cliff, etc. But dying in my dreams is never painful, just anticlimactic, so I don’t really mind. I should also mention, while we’re talking about dreams, that in something of a “fuck you” to my thoroughgoing disbelief in the supernatural, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I woke up from a bad dream around 6 am (that’s insanely early for me; maybe not for everybody) and couldn’t get back to sleep. The dream was that I was in a big office building, and it was on fire, and the friend who was with me said, “Let’s get the hell out of here,” so we did. When I awoke, I got up and paced around the house for a while to clear the dream out of my head. Then I started to feel ill—food poisoning, I assumed, from the Indian place where I’d had dinner the night before—and I kept pacing. As soon as the office was open, I left a message calling in sick. At that time, like Michael Notgrant Smith, I was walking to work every day, so normally I would have been just reaching the pedestrian deck of the Brooklyn Bridge when the first plane hit. This is the view now.
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