It's hard to believe, in the factory, how the satin feels and the diamonds gleam

I think time in my dreams is a spatial phenomenon. The night before last, I dreamed that I was closing up a house, tidying up the garden for the last time, pruning the boxwood, cutting willow withies, chasing birds away from the yew hedges. It was either the first or the last day of summer, and at dusk I burned all the sticks and leaves in a flagged ring of stones on the front lawn. But when I left the house, I was walking through rooms, each a different season and a different century, so that I had to duck underneath sprays of nineteenth-century holly and listen to a seventeenth-century denunciation of popish saints' days and somewhere was a room with one of those little artificial fountains, with copper-green basins shaped like leaves and pebbles and water streaming down different levels, except that it spilled out through the door and disappeared, and someone had folded little birds out of paper and set them floating downstream. And last night, I dreamed that I was high up in the mountains in the modern day with a sort of mercenary knight and his lady, except that she was (and always had been) a man in very careful, fifteenth-century drag. I have no explanation.

This is perhaps appropriate, because yesterday (after making the best cinnamon rolls ever^TM for my family, who now want more) I went to see a matinée of The Dream Project at Brandeis. I had no idea what to expect from the show, only that my friend Naya Chang had invited me and I see her with the depressing infrequency of most people I know right now; but she is crazily talented, so for her sake I went. Essentially, it was two interlinked short plays drawn from the dreams of the cast. The first, The Monkey King Dream Cycle, was a series of sketches dramatized from the dreams of all ten actors, flowing into and out of one another in their stream-of-consciousness fashion and presided over by the boastful, tricksterish Monkey King of Chinese legend, whose own dream—a recollection of his life before the Journey to the West—closes the first act. The second, Sara e Salvo, narrowed the focus to the dreams of one actor the summer she was involved with her childhood friend and cousin in Italy, so that we see very little of the real-life relationship, only the ways it is bent and refracted through her dreams. The cast of characters was constantly shifting, the sets little more than different levels and lighting with props of whatever seemed to have come to hand at the moment. (A pink plastic spoon mysteriously recurred throughout both halves of the show.) There were dreams of marriages and shy men and ants crawling underneath one's skin, dreams of dating Jason Alexander, walking across one's own spine like a tightrope, becoming the evil overlord of Canada. A recently dead friend asks in a dream for his story to be told, and so the audience hears it. Another student dreams about rehearsing for The Dream Project, and everything is very metafictional for a few minutes. Naya herself was the Monkey King, in peach-gold robes and a painted mask, and she was brilliant. Now if I can only manage more than one social interaction per month . . .

And today Sirenia Digest #17 and Not One of Us #37 both arrived in my (electronic and real-life) mailbox, which means that my dreams tonight will probably concern razor-nailed fishsex and baboon-headed film noir and companions in all the strangest ways.

. . . Okay, actually, I could live with that.