18 November 1998 – from Dream Notebook No. 1

Lots and lots of complicated forgotten stuff leading up to me being on the side of this big cliff or steep hill at the edge of the water somewhere (the ocean or Lake Erie). I'm standing next to a man who is maybe an Arab. I have a brown or tan pillowcase—with a pillow in it?—and I punch two holes in it, so they look like eye holes. The man tries to get it from me, but I throw it over the edge and it lands at the bottom, where we can barely see it. A bunch of people get freaked out and try to rescue it. The man seems to accuse me of a racist gesture, and goes off to try to rescue it. The media accuses me of a racist gesture. I argue through the counter-media that it is not racist. Finally, the man returns with the pillowcase. It is now transformed, perhaps dead, anyway, it's sad, and it means something completely different to me now. I touch it, and it is somehow religious and blessed—or just haunted. The man tells me his wife has died of cancer. It's like in just the time since he went to rescue the pillowcase—condensed time, that she got sick and died. I am very touched by all this. Then I have a poem enter my mind while waking up:

People get cancer and don't get over it—

People have strokes and don't get over it—

I eat lunch and live to tell—

My only concern is that this is Hell.