No dream again this morning, but husband, who must take so many pills each night to guarantee sleep that dreams are very rare, bounded out of his room for 8 a.m. coffee with a vivid dream I'll relate instead because I find it so lovely and flattering overall.

He and I sat at the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, a familiar haunt of his when he lived in Chicago many years ago. (In real-life he once had met there the neurolinguistic programmers Bandler and Grinder, he said.)

I sat on the corner stool, his favorite spot back in the day, when he was a hot horseplayer and dandy. He sat on the stool next to me. He wore a custom white-on-white shirt with French cuffs and diamond cufflinks, a necktie of purples and pinkish lavenders that looked mauve from a distance, custom-made wool worsted pants with a European cut that flared just a little over the tops of his Bally loafers. Cashmere sport coat under a cashmere overcoat ("The way I used to dress, actually"). He felt but did not see a discreet gold bracelet around his left wrist.

My costume was fine in its way: a soft large beret covered in feathers, a feminine white blouse with a subtle geometric pattern--diamonds and the like--just visible in the weave, a plain gray woolen coat with heavy leather frog closures, masculine wool trousers tucked into knee-high lace-up boots, also rather masculine. ("You looked so sexy in those boots," he said.) I wore four heavy rings on my fingers, set with large polished stones in hues of jasper and jade. (The ensemble was distinctly Georgia O'Keefe-ian, he said. I love this outfit, I said. "Well, I'm not gonna dream some shit you don't like," he said.)

We were there for a book signing--I was signing and giving away my book of poems to a crowd of young women and girls aged 12 to 20. He was bored and because I "wouldn't let him" drink he was forced to drink cup after cup of disgusting bar coffee. No more Heinekin-and-Cointreau for him. He was bored and a little resentful. He called a waiter over and ordered a gravy-bowl of ice cream from the kitchen. When it arrived it was some kind of orange sorbet coating over vanilla. (Oh!, I said. That's a Dreamcicle--your dream-maker is having you on. I love it when they do that. "I never heard of a Dreamcicle," he said. Husband is a rum-raisin man when it comes to ice cream.) He ate the ice cream sulkily, blaming me and my "prohibition" of drugs and alcohol (which in truth I never have stated explicitly, but which he infers from all the information I share with him about dopamine and mania and psychosis and the like) for his indulgence in sugar.

The book I signed was poems, the volume about 3/4-inch thick and maybe 5 by 8 inches or a little larger, softbound in ivory-colored vellum with elegant gray-green lettering. The pen I signed with was magical--the words flowed out practically unbidden and the page, when I was done signing, was beautiful. As I handed out the signed volumes I invited the young women to attend a class I was giving on poetry and the music in words. ("Your voice was particularly exquisite," he said. "And you know, voice is a 5th-chakra deal--knowledge and truth among other things. Your voice is a big part of why I'm so crazy about you.")

After the signing I took him down some stairs to "the Museum of Science and Industry," I said, although what we found there when we arrived was a huge reconstructed dinosaur skeleton--more of natural history thing.

The dream had an aching quality to it, a yearning, he said. We didn't have to ask what anything cost--the taxis, the clothes and restaurants--"There was a "distinct flavor of cultural hedonism."

"But then," he said, "you dragged me to the fuckin' museum."