I dreamt this morning that I was visiting with Tony Isabella, a comic book writer and editor I first met a very long time ago. To give you some idea as to how long, I’d never have gotten my job at Marvel Comics without him. (There we are below in a Marie Severin caricature originally published in an ancient issue of Marvel’s fan magazine FOOM.)

In the dream, I was hanging with him in a hotel room, where we were accompanied by a couple of PR flacks I’d never met before. We chatted for awhile, catching up, and then Tony playfully said, “Hmmm … I wonder where I’m going to find someone to finish this aliens story I don’t have time to write?” Which was his way of asking whether I would take over a project he couldn’t complete.

I told him it sounded good to me, and then those corporate types jumped in, clarifying with the details. It seems I’d misinterpreted when Tony had spoken of lower-case “aliens,” because this was no tale of random aliens I was needed to tell, but rather some sort of continuation of the film Aliens. For some reason, they also thought it important to mention that there be no music in whatever I wrote, that these aliens did not have that art form. Since it had never occurred to that they would, that didn’t bother me.

The dream ended with Tony and me sitting and talking, just two old friends who haven’t seen each other in an awfully long time filling in the missing years.

In a later dream, I was in a phone conversation with Michael Dirda while he was in Cambridge and I was at home, and I was recommending what bookstores he should visit while there … as if Michael would ever need advice from me on where the best bookstores are!