I dreamt I was in one corner of a busy con suite, banging away at a toy typewriter while Bill Shunn watched me and other writers waited their turn to use it. It was a pretty crappy toy typewriter, plastic instead of metal. The keys were of a solid piece with the body, so that they didn’t move when you hit them. The platen was fused into the rest of the machine so that it didn’t return, and there wasn’t even room to fit in a sheet of paper. So it almost looked like a fake you’d find in a furniture store to stand in for a real typewriter in a pretend office.

Bill asked me whether I wasn’t wasting my time banging away at a machine like that.

And I told him no, not really. It didn’t matter whether I was leaving any evidence of what I was writing there in front of us, because I knew that whether or not I had a record, somewhere in the world, someone I didn’t know was seeing my words appear in front of them. That was all that mattered. And I went back to typing.

Now there’s a dream that’s easy to interpret!

A note about my dreams in general, for those of you who follow them: When I wake from a dream in the middle of the night, I’ll scribble down a few words, sometimes only two or three, as a tickler. For example, with this dream, I scrawled, “Bill Shunn waste time plastic toy platen.” Then I’ll go back to sleep. And when I wake, I sometimes don’t even remember whether I’d had a dream or not. Until I look at the notepad. And when I read those few words, the entire dream comes rushing back.

Is it that way for any of you?