In Dreams

My dreams are filled with people these days, strangers who come onto our land, and into our house. Their faces are vivid. They might be people I’d see on the streets in town, or at the mall, or driving in cars–anywhere. In one dream, several of them have set up tents in our driveway, their sleeping bags and camp stoves and clothes lying about. Government trucks have cut a road through our woods and camouflaged personnel carriers come and go without stopping. I have a sense of an apocalypse, that our land has become a kind of refuge. Our house is like a barracks, but, still, it is mine and I don’t want to let the strangers in, though they insist and are violent and angry. They will not leave.

Houses in dreams are important, ostensibly representing our interior selves.

As I mark the pages of CALLING MR. LONELY HEARTS with my blue pencil (the copyeditor’s marks are red), I can feel the presence of this next novel. It, too, is waiting. It will be the story of a house–a house pulsing with the energy of the people who have lived and loved and died there. I know what it will be called, but I can’t tell you, yet. It’s a secret.