Clinton, South Carolina, Tuesday, April 28, 2020, 8:48 a.m.

She was a level-headed dancer / On the road to alcohol / And I was just a soldier / On my way to Montreal …

That I think a lot about John Prine songs is in part because he recently died, but it’s also because I have a feeling lots of them began in dreams. I have that feeling because I’ve been having a lot of them myself lately. And also because the name of the song above is “Spanish Pipedream.”

I guess it’s the loneliness of the pandemic. A trip to the grocery store is an adventure, comparatively. Minor matters become major. What do you mean there’s a two-dozen limit on eggs? Eggs are everywhere in this joint. How come there’s no limit on toilet paper? Oh, yeah. There isn’t any.

I didn’t say what’s listed just above. That’s why they’re italicized. In truth, I’m excessively good-humored. I’m overcompensating for the bandanna. I’m offsetting the look of a robber. I try to make the lady in the drive-through window laugh. While in line, I notice a beautiful tree rising above the building, and I want to take a photo of it.

The dreams must be subconscious attempts to rise above the drudgery. I had realistic dreams in grade school. I imagined a secret library with a shimmering chandelier, hidden away through a door in the old elementary school, where only I was allowed to go.

Last night I went to a city in the Midwest, where I enjoyed pleasant adventures in the company of a longtime friend, and then we traveled across the state to a similar city, where we went to an amusement park, and I bumped into a beautiful woman I once loved, and we laughed and rode the roller coaster together. Then, on the plane home, I was sitting across the aisle from another old friend, and I started to tell him that I’d bumped into the beautiful woman, and then I stopped because I realized he’d never believe it. Then I rolled over and saw that it was 5 a.m. and that I needed to go to sleep again. I finally got up at about 8 and sat on the edge of the bed trying to recall the dream and convince myself that it probably wasn’t true because it was unlikely that an airplane had a messy bedroom in it.

Now a fellow in a black tee is noting that these are difficult times, and the commercial ends and a guy immediately says these are “days of stress and catastrophe,” and the amusement park and the beautiful woman with her shiny brown hair tossing in the wind don’t seem bad at all.

Sleep has provided me with a key to escape reality.

 

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