I’ve always expected I would die in my sleep of a heart attack, sweating bullets, outrunning some cauchemare of a beast.
Tonight, in the dream, Betty & I went to see a Shakespeare play, in a park. Maybe in England, maybe at Jones Beach. & My dream came up with a kind of Shakespearean joke, dreamt lines that were in the play we were seeing, in which one character asks another, “Where are you going?” and the other responds “To and fro, here & there, somewhere & elsewhere.” (There were seven words to the answer, but I don’t know which seven, because those six could have been “north and south, whence & hence” etc.) By the time we were leaving it was dark out, & we were being followed by a man, except Betty couldn’t see him, even though I could hear him asking me, “Where are you going?” just like in the play, except terribly ominously.
& I felt like a cat or a dog that’s gotten wrapped up in something that makes a terrible noise and that it can’t get off of its body no matter how fast it runs like the devil away from this thing that’s always just right behind it.
I did learn how to dream lucidly as a result of my nightmares, at least, and so in the dream we ran to the house I grew up in, & kept shutting numerous garden gates after us, into the back door (which we always left open, though we locked the front one) & finally into a house that was nothing like the house I grew up in on the inside, but inside, there was my niece watching television & my sister, her mother, chatting on the phone amiably. & We were fine.
But of course all that running woke me up.