I Finally Slept, and Then I Dreamed ...

Joan Didion
&
John Gregory Dunne

Last night it took me awhile to convince Morpheus to embrace me, but he finally did, and sometime during that embrace Joyce and I met writers John Gregory Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion.

We were at some kind of event--plein air--and the two of them, middle-aged at the time--were holding forth about something and having a grand old time of it. They teased each other about computers. He said he had two of them; she said she had her mother's computer. [Don't even begin to ask me what that's about!]

As I think of it now, there were very few people there--a somewhat generic urban setting.

Then they began to leave, and I said to Joyce, let's go introduce ourselves! We trotted (!) after them, and they slowed only a bit. I told her I used to review books for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She said something that indicated she knew that the PD did not publish many reviews nowadays.

I told her I still reviewed a book a week for Kirkus Reviews.

She said, "Oh, I hear they have some very good people."

To which Witty I replied, "Just one that I know of."

They both laughed, and she told me I should review for her publication, Blue Verizon.

I asked if that were a publication for people depressed about their smart phones.

She smiled, and they danced away.

And then they were gone, and Joyce and I were walking across Randolph Avenue in downtown Enid, Oklahoma, where I grew up in the 1940s and 50s. We were not using a crosswalk, just in the middle of the wide busy street. I was attending to my iPhone, looking up Blue Verizon in a search engine.

A truck nearly ran us over. Stopped. The driver gestured impatiently. (But not obscenely: I dream clean!)

And then we were on the sidewalk, and we entered an antiquarian bookshop. I headed for the periodicals, hoping to find a copy of Blue Verizon.

I was looking through the stacks when I woke up with the certainty that I'd misheard Joan Didion: Surely she had said Blue Horizon!

**

I have little idea about where that dream came from. Joyce and I did recently watch that Netflix documentary about Didion (The Center Will Not Hold), and both Joyce and I have read a lot of her work--and I read some of Dunne's novels, too, back in the day. He's been dead since December 30, 2003 (he was 71), and Didion is now 83 years old.

I have had other dreams about meeting famous writers--from Norman Mailer to William F. Buckley Jr.--but nothing as detailed and intimate as this one.

If the events in the dream had actually happened, of course, Joyce would hardly have been a supporting player, the role my Dreaming Self assigned her. (It seems that even in sleep I can be a jerk.) But it's kind of weird, isn't it, apologizing for events in a dream?

But I'll say I'm sorry anyway ...