I dreamt this morning that I was visiting with Pat Cadigan. We were walking through the streets of London, accompanied by a radio interviewer.

Actually, I wasn’t the one being trailed—it was Pat who was being followed around and interviewed as she moved through her day. I just happened to be there chatting with her. She was the focus.

We came upon a street which was terribly crowded. There were long lines running this way and that, making the sidewalk almost impassable. It turned out that the reason for the crowd was that the Queen was doing a book signing. (As if Her Majesty would ever do such a thing!)

I waved an arm at the crowd and told both Pat and her interviewer that the Queen didn’t deserve this—this was the size of the crowd that Pat should be having for her own book signings.

We made our way through the throng, and continued on through the streets of London, touring until I eventually awoke …

I dreamt of my father again last night, the third or fourth time I’ve done so since he died in January. In the dream, he was alive again, and while not young, he was in his late ’50s or early ’60s, as opposed to his mid-’70s, looking sort of like he did in this photo.

I was visiting him in the living room of a house or apartment, only it wasn’t a place where he and my mother had ever lived in real life. I was showing him something online, and the site we were looking at wasn’t appearing on a desktop, laptop, or iPhone—the screen was being projected, taller than a person, on the wall of the room in which we spoke. And as I showed him various sites, he became concerned that I was downloading too many megabytes, that it would be too expensive.

He got up and leaned against the wall, scrolling through the pages by dragging his hands up and down quickly, making them whiz by, saying that this would all be too expensive for his internet provider. He worried about the cost of all the pages I was showing him. I wish I could remember exactly what sites it was I was trying to visit with him, but I can’t.

I expressed shock that his internet provider was so tight with the megabytes, and promised to find him a better one. I woke as we discussed this.

I’m thinking that perhaps I had this dream because of Charlie Brown, and the appreciation I wrote for him yesterday at Sci Fi Wire. While I was writing it, which wasn’t easy, something popped into my head and I thought, “Oh, I’ve got to to tell Dad about that,” then remembered, “Oh … that’s right … I can’t.”

So Dad was already in my mind yesterday more than he is during a typical day, perhaps sparking the dream. Whatever the reason, it was nice to see him again.

I had two dreams last night in which Irene was in danger in some way, either hurt or lost. I’m not sure where these dreams, separated by several hours, came from, particularly since she is in better shape this week than last from her broken ankle, so you’d figure my dreams wouldn’t be filled with fear, but they were, several hours apart.

In the first dream, we were walking through the woods nearby our home with another couple I don’t think I was ever able to properly identify, perhaps even my parents (which would be odd, since my my father is no longer with us, having died in January), when a couple of deer ran toward her and crashed into her, staggering her but not knocking her down. As Irene screamed, calling for me to come help her, the two deer kept between us so that I could not reach her.

Only now they were no longer deer, but rather some deer/moose hybrid, with big bulbous snouts melded with their otherwise deerlike bodies. In the dream, I didn’t think there was anything odd about this transformation. I kept running up to them, trying to get past them, punching them in those bulbous snouts, but they would not yield. I kept swinging at them, trying to dance around them, but I was never able to reach her. I woke with her cries still in my ears.

In the next dream, hours later, we were in a completely different environment, a large city, leaning on a railing watching some huge public event. Fireworks, perhaps? I don’t think it was a parade. The specifics are gone now, but as the crowded event, whatever it had been, breaks up, I lose track of Irene. No problem, I figure, I’ll just call her, and we’ll decide where to meet. So I pull out my iPhone, but no matter what I do, I cannot make a call. Either the screen freezes, or skips on the horizontal and/or vertical like an old-fashioned TV, or simply keeps turning itself off. I walk along, cursing at the phone, wondering how I’m going to find her.

Eventually, I do wander across her, with no sense of whether it had been through some deliberate action or accidental, somehow having found her on an upper floor of an apartment building whose hallways were just as crowded as the streets we were in at the beginning of the dream. I’m relieved to have found her, but we’re densely packed together, unable to move, and everyone around us is arguing how to disperse, whether to walk left or right, up the stairs or down. We’re not getting anywhere, and as I wake, we’re still trying to figure out how to get out of there and home.

Both times when I woke, she was right there next to me, which is all that matters.

Whatever it was my subconscious was trying to tell me, I’m not sure I deciphered the message.

I dreamt that I was in a cookie-cutter mall bookstore of the Borders or Barnes and Noble variety—long, narrow, and badly lit. I was reading a (non-existent in real life) beautifully designed three-volume collection of Michael Chabon’s essays and short stories. I’d pick up a book, settle in a comfy chair, skim through it, note a particularly fascinating sentence here and there, and then return it to the shelf in exchange for the next volume to enjoy in that comfy chair.

When I returned with the third volume, who should be sitting in the comfy chair next to mine but Jonathan Lethem. For some reason, we got into a discussion about whether or not he really existed. Not sure how we got on that topic, but in the dream, the discussion of his possible status as imaginary seemed entirely rational. We were discussing this situation both as if it was happening to us, but also as if we were just characters in someone else’s story.

Perhaps, I suggested, when the workers in the bookstore looked at me, all they saw was a guy talking to himself, gesticulating toward a empty chair. Talking about myself as if I was but a fictional character, I continued by saying that when they looked at me, they probably thought of me as harmless. Jonathan corrected me, as if taking about a story we would write, saying that, no, they’d instead see the character as a user.

With this, Jonathan stood up and said he was hungry. As I considered where we might head off to have dinner, I woke, and was, of course, hungry in reality.

I woke at 4:30 in the morning from a dream in which I was attending some convention so large it could have been the San Diego Comic-Con, only it wasn’t exactly the San Diego Comic-Con. I enter an auditorium in which a film is about to be played and find the room half full. I see Neal Adams in the audience, only not the Neal Adams of today, but rather the Neal Adams of the 1970s, even though it was today in the dream. He has a huge bucket of popcorn in his lap, as if he’s about to watch a blockbuster in his local theater instead of the documentary about Harlan Ellison which is about to begin.

I step outside for a moment—to get my own bucket of popcorn perhaps?—and when I return the theater is more populated, and I can no longer sit next to Neal the way I’d planned to. So I sit somewhere else. And then the film begins, but I can remember none of it. Not because I’ve forgotten what was playing out onscreen, but because the dream jump cuts to after the lights come back on.

And guess what? Someone has been murdered. I think. My memory is vague on that now. But I do remember that some horrible crime has been committed, which could have been murder, but it also could have been something else equally heinous, whatever that might be. (more…)

I dreamt this morning that I visited Harlan Ellison. Not in the playhouse he and Susan occupy in the real world, though. In my dreamland, they were living in an urban area in one of the storefronts of a strip mall. I never got inside, however, as Harlan came outside to greet me and talk. There was a dry cleaning shop immediately next door, and the owner stood in his doorway and watched us as we had our conversation.

We showed off signature sheets of our future projects to each other, and cooed over the illustrations we had gotten. Now that I’m awake, I can no longer identify the artists or the books in which the drawings were meant to appear, but the intricate color artwork was amazing. It was a pleasant, warm, friendly conversation.

One of Harlan’s publishers arrived to discuss his next book, so I said goodbye. We made plans to meet again before I left, though.

As I took off, I noted a large sign in the parking lot which contained a giant comic-book word balloon the size of a car, meant to be filled in by old-style movie theater letters, or the kind you see used in church signs. Beneath it was a note to Harlan’s visitors which seemed aimed more at those fans he wouldn’t come out to see. They were invited to fill in the balloon with quotations, and if Harlan liked the saying he would leave it until the next visitor came along to change it.

As I crossed the street, I had to leap to avoid getting hit by a bus. Then, walking back to the train station so I could head home, I got lost. I woke as I wandered.

It was 6:15, and I would have liked to roll over and get another hour of sleep, but could not. I had Harlan on my mind.

Among my dreams last night were two which related to writing and publishing, one set in the world of science fiction and horror, the other in comics.

In the first, at about 3:00 a.m., I was at a convention in a packed room. I was sitting next to my old pal Gene O’Neill in an audience of several hundred. We were there because he was about to give a talk and reading, and I was supposed to introduce him. We each held manuscripts in our hands. As I was being called to the podium to say a few words to lead into his presentation, Gene slipped me a page containing a description of his latest novel, which I assume had to be this one, though in the dream it remained unidentified. I waved him off, telling him that if I used his words instead of my own, people would sense me parroting him, and never believe all the good things I was about to say about it. I woke before the talk began, but with the mood happy and us both enjoying ourselves.

I assume that this dream came about because of that new book, Lost Tribe, showing up in the mail last week, but also because we were both on HWA’s preliminary Stoker ballot, and the final ballot should be announced any moment—in fact, I was expecting to hear yea or nay over the weekend—so it’s very much on my mind. My fingers are crossed that we get to see each other in June as nominees. (more…)

I woke in the middle of the night from a dream that started out science fictional and turned personal. The dream’s ending seemed so tense to me that for a while, as I lay there in the dark, I thought I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. Thankfully, I eventually did.

It started out innocently enough. I was in a store buying some books. They were all anthologies, perhaps because of the string of them I’ve been reading in real life. (I’m in the middle of the Ellen Datlow-edited Poe right now). That morphed into me autographing a copy of one of the DAW anthologies in which my stories have appeared for a customer who’d recognized me. I’m not sure which title it was.

The next thing I know I was instead in a condo with the person whose book I was signing, and the electricity went out. It was so dark that I could barely see. I kept flicking light switches, but nothing would happen. Eventually, the sun came up—I could see it rise over an uninterrupted horizon out the front window—and illuminated the room. I was alone now, and the only sound was distant music. I went in search of the source of that music, which seemed to me to be coming from a radio in a back room.

I wandered the halls, opening closed doors, and eventually found a man tied up in one of the bedrooms. The radio volume was turned high so that no one could hear him calling for help. I stared at him for a moment before realizing that he was my maternal grandfather, Nathan Goldstein, looking younger than I’d ever known him.

I was in the past, which, since this was a dream, I did not question.

“What are you waiting for,” he said, not recognizing me for his future grandchild. “Untie me!”

My grandfather, who in this waking world died twenty years ago in his late 80s, was a bookie and an alcoholic. He hung around with unsavory characters. He could be tremendously charming, the life of the party. But let him take that first drink and things went downhill fast. So when you were with him, you never knew which Nathan Goldstein you were going to get, which meant you were always on edge.

As soon as I untied him, he rushed from the room, telling me to wait there while he dealt with those who had done this to him. Once he was gone, however, all I could think was … there’s no way that becoming part of his life will turn out well, not even if he now considers me his rescuer.

So I left the condo and went out into the street to get way from that entanglement, while wondering, based on his apparent age, what year it was. The ’50s? The ’40s? As I tried to think whether any of my knowledge of the past would help me escape from him and make my way in that time, I woke. I was tense from the encounter, and didn’t think I could get back to sleep … but by forcing myself to think of other things, I was able to clear him from my mind, and eventually did.

I dreamt this morning that I was the Toastmaster at a Nebula Awards banquet, a task which I already did once in real life, back in 2000, so I’m not sure why I was doing it again. I spent time greeting friends, though the only ones I can remember now that I’m awake are Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. But I didn’t spend too much time schmoozing, because I was mostly interested in finalizing my patter, focusing primarily on roasting Robert Silverberg, since I needed to introduce him for some reason. Not sure what award would bring him to the stage, though, as he was made a SFWA Grand Master years ago.

When we all moved into the banquet room, instead of many tables of eight or ten people each, as occurs in real life, there was instead a single table stretching from the podium across the room.

My research for my talking about Bob consisted mostly of tracking down the most embarrassing early writing of his I could find, so I could read awful quotes and comment on them, basically showing that if someone that bad could get so good, there was hope for all of us.

As for the rest of my duties that night, such as introducing award presenters, I was going to let my iPhone take care of them. To show how science fictional the world had become, I was going to use apps to do the introducing for me. I’d found one into which you could enter a person’s name, and it would search online and generate an introduction, including not only relevant information, but jokes about them as well. And from time to time, I planned on using an excuse generator, versions of which actually seem to exist in real life, to offer reasons for me not having bothered to draft anything in that particular case.

What can I say? In the dream, it somehow seemed as if it would be entertaining.

I woke as I took to the podium to begin.

And speaking of iPhones, this entry has been written on one, as my PowerBook crashed and burned Sunday, the geniuses at the Apple Store declared on Monday that all I now had was a very shiny paperweight, and I’ve been laptopless ever since!

So there I am in a dream this morning on a packed bus in Egypt, heading with a group of other tourists to visit the ruins. (In the real world, Irene and I visited Egypt in 2006, but I’m not sure whether my dream self was aware of that.) Only we never make it to the sites, instead ending up in a disappointing museum filled with broken audio-animatronics, cheap plastic replicas of artifacts, and tacky tabletop displays purporting to explain the history of the region which contain flickering lights that don’t always work and have been constructed with all the polish of a grade-school science fair.

No one else even bothers to look at these exhibits, instead scurrying straight through to the cafeteria at the far end of the building, but I pause at every one, reading plaques and pushing buttons, all the while wondering why we didn’t head to Abu Simbel or Luxor … or anywhere else but here.

By the time I finish my dutiful examination and catch up with the rest of the group, they’re seated in the cafeteria, having finished eating, and surrounded by the detritus of their meals. Most of them have pulled their chairs in a ring around Cory Doctorow, who I hadn’t even realized was traveling with us.

When I look at what’s available to eat, all I can see are candy bars, but these aren’t the standard U.S. ones I’m used to. They’re all foreign brands, such as those I’ve marveled at in London, like Mint Aeros and Cadbury Flakes. Finding these unfamiliar treats fills me with a strange sort of joy. I scoop up handfuls of the sweets, and as I dance back to show off my spoils to Cory, I wake.