Had a long anxiety dream about trying to find my way through the subway stations of lower Manhattan. Not only that, I had to use their toilets. When heading down the steps into a station, I reflected that for the foreseeable future this was how I’d have to do things, that my life was stuck this way. Then the dream switched to a presidential candidate pitching big donors on how he was the only shot for running the country right. He was sort of like Bill Clinton but with all the drawbacks removed and some strengths put in. The two dreams make quite a contrast. Maybe I got tired of the dismalness and decided to be vainglorious.
I dreamt that I was a writer at the Tonight Show in New York. I never saw Johnny, and at one point it occurred to me that Jay was the host now and everybody ought to be in Los Angeles. Or really that Fallon person was the host, but I was always going to forget him and couldn’t stop now. As Jay’s writer, I sat at a long table in a high-ceilinged, sunny room overlooking the city, with one other person also sitting there. We were both new recruits, but he was older and had a grizzled beard. At first I jotted helplessly in my notebook while he concentrated; then I saw him looking at the newspapers for ideas. I realized I just had to write jokes like the ones I’d always heard on the show. So I wrote one about Trump and thought it hit the mark.
Last night’s crop of dreams included hanging out with Yoko Ono. We were taking a class together on the history of avant-garde art, and she told me I could stop worrying about trying to remember the names and dates. I had a lot of trouble remembering them, as is usual in an anxiety dream, but her advice made me feel like I didn’t really get the spirit of what we were studying; therefore, the anxiety continued. After class she suggested we get together for that weekend’s big sale of used books at the Strand, at which point the dream shifted to my worries about getting in touch with a young fellow with a room in his apartment that I’d agreed to rent. That had been the week before and he hadn’t heard from me since, so I had ground to make up. And so it went.
My dreams last night involved a long journey from midtown Manhattan to a place deep within Rockland County, which now resembled the mountain villages of Mexico. I had to start walking back to Piermont and wound up as a student at a SUNY school. The initial journey, from Manhattan to Rockland, was in a shared taxi driven by a Middle Eastern immigrant who turned into Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos, played by Tony Sirico.