My friend Oeddie...

3:00am. I wake from a dream in which I am being swept by a large body of clear cool water towards the lip of a dam. The dam stretches widely to either side of me under blue sky. As I get near the lip of the dam I see that my mother is there with a young boy. They are both about to be swept over the top, but the boy is trying to hold her there. They thrash about in the water and teeter on the brink. I approach and yell to the boy to hold her. I get there before they go over and grab my mother to fling her back from the brink. That was where the dream stopped and I woke.

I stayed awake for two hours, though I didn't feel any special anxiety--just couldn't go back to sleep. Finally I did get to sleep again and dreamed that I was in a big car on a city street. The street was very wide, ridiculously so, and was grassed over instead of being paved. The driver of the car was a black man, fairly young, and I sat in the passenger seat. We were at the top of long hill, so that we could see the street dropping before us across a series of rolling hills until it came to the bottom. There was some body of water there, and another vista stretching beyond it. The sky was golden with sunrise or sunset, and the colors were everywhere bright.

I looked down the road and thought that it would be fun to just zoom down the hill in the car as though it were a carnival ride, maybe flying into the air as I crested the descending hills. This thought made me so happy that I reached to my left and grabbed the steering wheel from the driver, and used my left foot to step on the gas. The driver was irritated by this hijacking, and I was afraid that he might think I was a racist, that I thought he couldn't handle the driving.

We went down quickly, picking up speed. It was thrilling to fly along and I turned the wheel this way and that to make the car playfully swerve. But halfway down we were going too fast and I began to brake. By the time we reached the bottom of the hill I was pushing the brake pedal as hard as I could, so that we barely were able to stop before running into a car at the crossroad there. We turned and drove on to my apartment(?).

I enter the apartment by myself. The rooms are dark and no one is there. I hear some noises from the bedroom in the back of the house and for some reason interpret them to be from Sharon, a woman I once lived with. I make my way to the bedroom, but find that the sounds were from Sandy's grandmother, deceased for several years now. She is crawling around the large bed there, crying out in distress. The bed is Georgia earth colored, as large as four beds, and there are old gravestones scattered across it. Sandy's grandmother is crawling around among them, wailing for her own stone. "Where is my gravestone?" She picks at one stone after another searching for it. I notice that some of the markers are very worn, hardly more than small rough stones without letters. Finally she does find it. "Look what they've done to it!" she cries. It is smaller than a loaf of bread, pitted and worn. She holds it in her hands and thrusts it into my face.

I leave the bedroom and turn down the hall that leads back to the living room. As I pass the door to the kitchen I'm confronted by my own mother, dead now for several years, looming from the doorway. She is younger than when she died, and she fills the doorway. I stagger back screaming in shock and nearly collapse to the floor. She enters the hallway, not especially in a threatening manner, and tells me that reports of her death were greatly exaggerated. In waking life I would not have expected her to quote Twain.

Then she stumbles or somehow starts to fall. Her body is rigid and she falls like a tree coming down, almost in slow motion. I leap to her and catch her to break her fall. It works but I end up almost on top of her on the carpet. I feel compelled to tell her that I love her very much: "I love you so much," I cry out. But the moment is decidedly erotic and I throw myself off of her immediately in guilt. I wake with heart pounding.

The search goes on.

Vicksburg. I'm walking down a city street. I find my way to a new mall area and descend a flight of steps inside that take me to a lower level. The steps are small and wooden, each one rickety and difficult to walk on--despite the relatively new mall. I come to the lower floor and go into a shop, which is the Attic Gallery. There I find Daniel, who I knew when I lived in Vicksburg. There are several people behind a counter waiting on people who need artwork framed. Daniel tells me that I've come at a bad time, because he and his wife Leslie have just divorced. I leave the area but cannot now find the steps, and I'm forced to clamber out of the lower level through a window. Potted plants partially block my way.

I return home (my home in Athens) and it is night. As I pull up to our long driveway I see that there is a police car parked by the mailbox. Its blue lights are on and flashing. I drive past it and go down the driveway. The house, when I enter, is lit up but no one seems home. I look around for Sandy. In the kitchen, which is very brightly lit, I discover that the back door is open and that the dining table is missing. Cold air is pouring in through the open door, which I close.

I enter the bathroom and first see what I think to be Sandy sitting on the closed toilet. I'm shocked, because her head seems to be missing. But it's not her, or anyone. Instead, it is her clothes stuffed with something so that they vaguely resemble a scarecrow. Up close it's clear that the job has been done casually, and no once could mistake the thing for a real person. I glance over at the bathtub and see Sandy under the water in the tub. I'm struck with fear because she looks dead, but I see a small bubble of air escape her mouth. I reach into the bath and pull her up out of the water by her shoulder. Once out, she stands and peers around with an expression both dazed and haughty. She seems not like herself. I wake gasping and shaking.