Blanket

 I can hear Ted Koppel’s voice coming from somewhere, reporting on the violence that I’m seeing with my own eyes—terrorists shooting people with automatic weapons and throwing grenades. In a different dream, Audrey Hepburn attempts assassination. But before she can fire on her target, the woman ducks so that the bullet flies painlessly past. They are just feet apart; how could she miss? Although a talented actress, I suspect Audrey Hepburn isn’t a very good assassin.
The OED defines “subconscious” as “Operating or existing (just) below the level of conscious perception or control; esp.…not clearly perceived or recognized;…partly or wholly involuntary; instinctive, unwitting.” I’m least likely to remember dreams when my writing is going well. I think this is because when I’m writing well, I’m so much in my head, already channeling my subconscious, so that my dreams at night are subtler, less jolting, more boring. When I’m unable to write because of work or life issues, especially when I’m depressed or stressed or suffering from anxiety, my dreams are often vividly violent and weird.
I’m educated. I have a PhD, tenure, and when I speak to my students sometimes my voice booms with strong feeling. When I drive past my colleagues in the parking lot, I honk and wave. Many times, the song playing on the radio will then be a soundtrack for the dream I have the next morning. I try to record all the elements I can remember of a dream—narrative, sound, thoughts—but most dreams—like inspiration, like love—are too complex and confusing to translate literally. And sometimes, I decide that the dream I had is too vague or run-of-the-mill to bother writing down.
I used to sleep with my journal on the bedside table, but I get the sense that it stresses my wife out when I sit up in bed in the morning and immediately start writing next to her while she is trying to wake up. We’re wobbly in the morning, coming back into the world of the conscious, and I don’t want to be the kingpin that knocks her over, so I go to the kitchen counter to do my writing. Often, I make my coffee and swallow my pills, sometimes even brush my teeth, and so by the time I sit down to write, my dream has faded like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. My petite wife is getting large with our first-born child. I picture our son floating safe inside her womb, imagine him as a dreamer inside a dream, all that subconscious wrapped around him like the softest blanket imaginable.