Before the coronavirus became a round-the-clock nightmare, mine were confined to nighttime. In one of them, I was telling a young woman worried about her boyfriend, who was sitting, in bad shape apparently, on a bench not far off, to call 911.
She handed me the phone and I said, “Nine-one-one? Come quickly to the Bridgehampton School. Someone needs help.” And then, not waiting for an answer, I woke up, Mary having preceded me out of bed, worried, in real time, about one of our granddaughters far away, a 3-year-old undergoing an operation to remove her tonsils and adenoids. (She made it with flying colors, we were told later, though the operation went on much longer than the doctor had originally said.)
On the outside I was fine, reading Emerson and trying to get it right with Nature and the Over-Soul — if only it weren’t for the ticks — and generally moving forward each day with optimism, Emerson being good for that, no matter that for long stretches I find him to be almost incomprehensible, like a dense thicket . . . because he was a Transcendentalist, I suppose.
I am likewise transcended often by the poems of Emily Dickinson, a thick volume of which I keep on my bedside table, hoping — usually in vain — that just before I doze off something will click. Over our bed, I have one of hers that I do understand, the one about “wild nights,” and “rowing in Eden,” a marvel that indeed does, as she said poems were supposed to do, take the top of your head off. “Done with the compass / Done with the chart!”
Back to the dreams, perhaps I was having Mary’s and she mine. A caller around that time thought it was she when I answered the phone. I said that it was perhaps because we, being long married, were becoming one, adding, however, that in certain physiological respects we still differed.
Mary is, as I’ve said, the uber worrier chez nous. If I, the optimist, am having troubling dreams, she ought then to be having pleasant ones, but it doesn’t seem to work that way, even though, subconsciously, I may, as I say, be trying to lighten her burden. I dreamt, for instance, the other night that I was interviewing someone with a notepad — a notepad of all things — and madly scribbling, illegibly, of course, and was trying vainly to read what I’d written.
Do I wake or sleep?