So I'm moving to New York 'cause I've got problems with my sleep

After two increasingly, appallingly bad days, I finally passed out last night while it was still dark and slept for nearly nine hours. In that time, I dreamed first that I was sharing the role of Clara/Marie in a kind of ballet-with-speech of The Nutcracker being staged somewhere in Boston; it was semi-modern dress and minimal sets, but still much closer to Hoffmann's original even than Balanchine's choreography. All the dialogue was in German. I remember hanging out between scenes with the boy who played the seven-headed Mouse King, a tumbler and puppeteer with a flamelike vertical script I didn't recognize tattooed up and down his thin, wiry forearms. It follows as reasonably as anything else that later on in the dream I was visiting partly nonexistent friends in D.C. and ran into Claude Rains in a coffeeshop so post-historically ironic, the chai-type drink I was buying to go with my grape-and-azuki-bean cake (does anyone actually eat these?) was named after one of the Etruscan Dodecapoli. He wasn't a ghost; he was small, courtly, silvery, outrageously flirtatious, with more lines in his face than I'd seen in any of his movies. We got him a ticket to the show we were seeing that night, the touring production of the musical Sondheim didn't write between Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd; I don't remember any of it except a catchily disjointed, full-company number that anticipated "God, That's Good!" Hanging around the theater afterward, I think somebody suggested that we should rent My Favorite Year (1982), but we never got around to it that I recall. Also I wrote some erotica, but not to Claude Rains. It was more feline than anything else.

Honestly, this sort of thing does make me feel better about my mental state. I'm sure actually sleeping more than two or three hours a night doesn't hurt, either.