In this morning’s dream, I’m very aware that I have an appointment to get together with Kim Newman at a specific time, but instead I find myself in the back seat of a moving car sorting potatoes. I’ve got about a bushel’s worth of baking potatoes in a paper bag, and I’m transferring them to a box, arranging them in neat rows as I do so. As I admire my handiwork, I suddenly realize that in the front of the car are Harlan and Susan Ellison. Harlan is driving, while Susan is in the passenger seat.

Susan tells me that she wished I’d have let them buy the potatoes, because there’s no way I could have found any as good as the ones they could have picked up. I insist that I’ve managed to find absolutely perfect potatoes. As Harlan drives, he reaches back so I can place one in his hand. He looks at it and says that he knows where to find better. He speeds up, while I wonder how long this is going to take and whether this trip is going to end with me standing up Kim Newman.

We arrive at a farm in the country. At least, I assume that there’s a farm somewhere, as I see no buildings, no people, only straw and mud and hundreds of tiny baby chicks scurrying about. Harlan puts the car into four-wheel drive, which suddenly becomes necessary, and we bounce across the land, with me being tossed me this way and that in the back seat as we head for what’s supposed to be the perfect potato. I wake while trying to remember how I got there and whether this road trip could possibly be over in time for me to catch up with Kim, an event which is supposed to happen in exactly two hours.

Once awake, I realized why I had Harlan on the brain. When I heard yesterday that Forrie Ackerman is seriously ill and not long for this world, the first thing that came to mind was that long-ago Readercon at which Harlan gave a speech savaging Ackerman and others. He surprised me by plucking me from the audience to look over his shoulder while he read a letter from Ackerman to Bob Bloch in which Ackerman, knowing Bloch was about to die, asked him to sign a copy of Psycho with the inscription “my last autograph.” Harlan had announced that he was pulling me to the stage because he felt that if he simply read the letter without a witness, the audience would think he was making it up, but that since I had the reputation of being trustworthy, people would believe it was real. So he read the letter aloud while I peered over him, after which he asked me to verify that he’d read it accurately. Whenever I saw an update yesterday on Ackerman’s situation, that’s the moment I’d remember.

So that explains Harlan’s presence in my dream … though I still have no idea why potatoes were involved.