Midnight Purchase

"Come Alive", mixed media, 28 x 18 in.

So I'm just sliding into a convertible with a lovely woman who's about to drive me to some fancy dance or something. "Better get a shirt", she says. I look down and am seized with embarrassment and frustration to discover that I didn't wear one! Now she'll have to wait while I go racing across the (college?) campus to get a shirt. For the first stretch I'm bounding, taking great leaps, worried that the building might be locked. I turn a corner to see with relief that it's open. However, precisely because I'm rushing, I find I'm now plowing through honey and then crawling, digging into the ground with my claws, struggling for traction. I see I’m in the stadium crawling through people; excuse me, sorry, comin’ thru, ouch.

Just then the phone jerks me upright, out of my dream.  I drag myself out of bed and, clutching at the door frames, stagger through the dark clear across to the far end of the next room and grope into the corner. This has got to be serious. "Hello?" I grog. Pause, click, "Hi!” says the cheery voice, “This is Fran Lescher. Perhaps you know me from the TV sho--"  I slam down the phone and squint toward the clock. A robocall at three bloody thirty in the morning!! There's not even a real person there to swear at! I stomp back to bed trailing enough steam to peel the wallpaper and throw myself in again.

Whatever those bastards were selling I've in fact bought a sleepless halfnight of restless churning over the general mess of things: how I fit into the world, the health of civilization, our chances of survival... Among the thoughts that drift over my innerscape appears a question: have I, by mindlessly neglecting my shirt, condemned some poor dream woman to wait in her car FOR-as these things go-EVER?  Is it not then totally possible (such betrayals do occur in this life) that these dream events have a direct affect in our world? 

Then the horrible possibility strikes me like a stone in the solar plexus: the woman waiting to get my ass back in the car!  Oh my God!  Could it be?  Maybe she's… Fran Lescher!