Morning Dream in Four Parts, with Dénouement

PART ONE: It is the present. It is late afternoon and I am walking on a downtown sidewalk. A sizable crowd of young urban professionals has spilled out from a trendy bistro sort of place. I get caught up in the crowd and I feel foreign, disquieted, and submerged but I do not panic. In fact, in my dream I feel cooly analytic about the situation although I sincerely want to escape.

PART TWO: Suddenly, I am inside my ex-girlfriend’s studio apartment, who is by now fifty years old. She is not at home and I am surprised to discover that she has a roomate who is in her early twenties and who is in the kitchenette preparing dinner. I watch the roommate as I lie on a nearby king-size bed which has no headboard or footboard. In my hands I hold one of those women’s fashion magazines.

I am underneath the bed covers – a pink and yellow floral comforter – completely naked. I feel uncharacteristically comfortable and I am hoping that the roommate will notice and join me. She is very appealing and she comes over very matter-of-factly and we make love under the covers. It is very brief, and she is sincerely pleased about it all, so I fully realize that I am in a dream.

PART THREE: My ex-girlfriend comes home with her husband and her grade-school-aged son. The roommate is serving dinner. I am still in bed and I feel like it is inappropriate for me to be there, in plain view, while they are eating, although only my ex-girlfriend seems to notice or care. Her jealousy makes me uncomfortable and I want to leave.

PART FOUR: The roommate gets up from the table, and comes over, and tells me I am welcome to use the shower. I demur saying it’s okay, I’ll just put on my clothes and sneak out. She insists it would be all right for me to use the bathroom and she returns to the others.

I am completely naked as I walk past them on my way to the bathroom. It strikes me as odd that I feel no sense of self-consciousness; only a slight sense of pride that the roommate finds me desirable in her detached, dispassionate kind of way. When I get to the doorway of the bathroom, I realize it belongs to my ex-girlfriend and not to the roommate.

It is wrong of me to use my ex-girlfriend’s bathroom and suddenly I am in the roommate’s bathroom, which is not inside the apartment. Rather, it is outside in the back yard; just a shower head and knobs sticking out of the side of the building and I reason that I must have gotten there by walking through the bifold closet doors that form the back entryway to the apartment.

I observe that any of the neighbors can easily see me, except that right beside me is a mature deciduous shrub in which a garden spider has built an enormous spider web. I admire its beauty and at the same time I am grossed out that I might rub up against it with my wet, naked body. I am standing on a concrete stepping stone to keep my feet off the muddy lawn.

DẾNOUEMENT: Then I wake up. I get out of bed and go to the bathroom. I perform a routine systems check and I am glad to find I did not ejaculate in my pajamas. I reflect upon the whole situation, while my prostate gently weeps. Mrs. Bissage stirs in bed but she does not awaken.

THE END