Yesterday's dreams had me in a lovely great old shabby hotel where hardly anyone lived. My own house stood directly behind it across an alley. I wandered through the hallways and in and out of the rooms. I meant to rent an office there but kept putting it off. I imagined I could not afford the expense. Then a young writer friend from Real Life rented it instead, and it turned out to have been only $20 a month!

This morning's dreams were less vivid, more fantastical. I remember climbing a long narrow ladder from our home (which had no ceilings) up through an opening in the sky to The World Above. A half-dozen or so suited young gentlemen were climbing down to visit my husband at the same time, and I feared they would prevent me from ascending on the narrow ladder. But we passed one another without incident, me clinging just barely to the right-hand vertical as they descended, very high above the earth. At length I climbed out through an opening onto a busy one-way highway several lanes across, and began to walk on the narrow shoulder, against the traffic, which traveled at very high speed.

***

"Read as dream symbols, ordinary occurences yield depths of information and teaching completely unsuspected by the untrained observer" (Ray Grasse, The Waking Dream.

"O Nature and O soul of man; how linked art thine analogies; not the smallest atom exists in matter that does not have its cunning duplicate in mind" (Herman Melville, Moby Dick.

***

Watched the fishes eat their breakfast. They are growing fast now, and average probably five inches in length, including their tails. Two graceful white ones, five koi-like mottled orange and white, one black fantail, and one a plain trout shape, bluish-bronze in color and extremely difficult to see. The black one is like a shadow, the bluish one like a ghost. They've become greedy now, and when I drop the flakes on the water they all ascend at once and roil the surface and make faint smacking noises with their tiny gulps.

I pulled and discarded two stiff thorny Scotch thistles almost ready to blossom in the lawn, and plucked three dandelion leaves for my midday tea, and a handful of blades sprouted from millet seeds the wild birds dropped under the feeder, to give to the lovebirds in their cage.

Continuing my new work schedule, which is more relaxed than in careers of yore.
I'm enjoying this project. The language needs a lot of work and that necessitates intense focus--nothing I love more! And the subject matter is dear to my heart; losing myself in it gives me a lot of satisfaction.

The weather continues mild with slight breezes. Even now, at 12:30 in the afternoon, the air through the window is cool and clean. In my 12 years at this altitude this is the first bearable summer. It's perfect for plants. Too bad I haven't more resources to make a yard with. I'm getting to know the weeds rather well, though, and with all my watering more and more species are germinating to bring this gravel plate back to life. Bunchgrasses and pigweed, abundance of wild asters where the drainage is poor. I do pull the sowthistles and skeleton mustard. Sweet clover is working hard to break the hardpan up, but I cut it when it reaches a great size. It smells so wonderful and feeds the compost pile. A little patch of hollyhock came up out of nowhere and I make sure to water it, too. We're unlikely to see flowers from this homely biennial until next year, but I'm flattered the species feels safe enough here to try and make a go of it.

The water I give everything has been fertilized by my nine goldfishes in their trough. After I finish filling and refilling the watering cans there I top off the trough water again with fresh stuff from the hose, and so keep the fishes clean and aerated. Their pond lilies are doing so well this year and have blossomed twice. Their round leaves finally have achieved sufficient size and numbers to shade the fish on hot days in the absence of leafy overhangs (deer kill every little tree I plant). I cover the trough anyway with a scrap of lattice to keep the algae down. The cats love to relax on it in the morning shade from the house and watch the fishes' bright movements through the gaps.

It was 40 years ago today I was married for the first time. We were 18 and living in Estherville, Iowa.

After striking out in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which we'd been told was an "18 state" (not so), we'd hitch-hiked north through Minnesota and then east to Ironwood, Michigan, "Home of the World's Tallest Fibreglas Indian." I wore a red calico granny dress and he wore purple striped bellbottoms and a purple-pinstriped cotton shirt. We exchanged vows in a storefront insurance office; the salesman, who was confined to a wheelchair, was a justice of the peace in his spare time. His small terrier dog never left his side.

The other young couple there, who were virtually identical to us, served as our witnesses, and then we served as theirs, and afterward they gave us a lift west as far as Minneapolis.

One year later we were parents of a newborn baby boy,

and a year after that I stepped off a plane in Los Angeles carrying my one-year-old, and never looked back.

This time of year always has meant new beginnings for me.

Dandelion leaves for winter, and some yarrow leaves, too.

In my last night's dream I was personal assistant to an elderly, besotted Peter O'Toole. I cared for him, guided him home after a day's meandering, put him to bed, and was present just to listen to his stories, which I loved. He was very fond of me. When I lay down with him at night he seemed happy to have me there. He was staying in a great castle comprised of tiny rooms and serpentine hallways. The walls were painted brilliant colors--red and gold and orange--and heaps of colorful clutter lay everywhere. There was a bit about kings, royalty, marble statues, fragments of armor and ornate swords and daggers. He was expected on-set for a film he was in. Even though O'Toole was so very old and so very very drunk we had great fun together out in the world, like children, laughing at our jokes and sneaking in places and playing pranks. As I chauffeured him about I felt pure delight and privilege to be with him as he made a spectacle of himself, and to bask in his seeming affection. But after all it wasn't so deep: when the shoot ended and managers swooped in to take him away he didn't think twice about it or look back at me as they left.

But it was so much fun, so much fun while it lasted.

***

Cool this morning. Only 60 degrees at 9 a.m. This summer has been remarkably cool; we've breached 90 only once or twice, and every night is cold.

Now that I understand my neurology I finally can grasp the root cause of my lifelong dilemma--my longing for the company of others and my inability to cope with their presence. Alone, I diminish and pine, yet I pay for any lengthy social exposure with days spent getting my mind right again. Now I understand the situation I feel better about it. Wistful, but finally accepting. It all comes down to strategizing and balance. Our biweekly Game Days serve me well (even though at four hours they are at least an hour too long).

***

Words erupt at the surface like rising springs. Freshets. The ground of me ruptures with little raptures of clear water from depths repressed/suppressed, pressed and pressured. I love this feeling. I've missed it for years. How shall I shut it off again?

Don't. Don't.

***

Later I'll drive out for errands--we're out of milk and potatoes and low on O.J. I must mail some DVDs to youngerSon and fetch drying baskets from storage. The afternoon's task: pluck a peck of dandelion leaves in the shaded yard east of the house. Snip some yarrow stalks to hang for drying. Maybe comfrey leaves and echinacea blossoms, though I hate to take them, they're so pretty.

I've read about one-quarter now of Weeds, Guardians of the Soil and it delights me to know the sweet clover out back is breaking up the subsoil hardpan with its fierce roots, and the pigweed pulls moisture up along its rootsurfaces from deep down to up top where it nourishes everything around it.

In the dream diary of Graham Greene I read

The waking have one world in common,
but the sleeping turn aside each
into a world of his own.
                  Heraclitus of Ephesus, 500 BC

"There is another side to what we call dreams . . . ," Greene says. "They contain scraps of the future as well as of the past. . . . As I look through the long record of my dreams I note time and again incidents of the Common World that have occurred a few days after the dream." Or in my case decades.

And a little flash just now as I grasp the connection--this is why I am reading these books concurrently. Can you see? Dreams are to waking what weeds are to crops. Dreams open up the hardpan down deep. They make a path for nourishment to rise along. They bring forth moisture during drought and warm the ground in winter.