Dreams and great books

It seems like every personal website I visit lately has a list of Great Books that the writer has read. Or, I guess, a list of "Great Books," annotated to show which ones the writer has read--I don't think I've run across anyone who claims to have read them all.

I'd do it, but I'm afraid I'd have to say that I've read none of them, or at least almost none.

I'm not sure what that means--I mean, I know that it means that I have no interest in great literature, but I don't know if it means that I missed something important in my education. I mean, surely I was exposed to these books in high school; but maybe just in a cursory way, maybe all the people who are writing about them studied them in college, in pursuit of English degrees or some such.

I read a LOT during my school years. I read John D. MacDonald, and Dashiel Hammett, Earl Stanley Gardner and Ayn Rand. I read the Brontés--I read Little Women and Little Men, and Wuthering Heights; I read some Dickens, at least A Christmas Carol. I read Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Daphne Du Maurier and Rex Stout. Trevanian and Agatha Christie. I walked to the library in the summer and carried home armloads of books, and I woke up early on school days and read for a half hour in bed. I remember sitting in the garage supervising one of my mother's garage sales and reading The Maltese Falcon.

I read huge historical and gothic romances in high school (the same time that I was watching Dark Shadows every afternoon when I got home from school).

Oh well, I guess I might as well do it (the ones in bold are the ones I've read). More than I thought, actually. Some I probably did read in school (The Red Badge of Courage, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Call of the Wild, etc.), but have absolutely no recollection of. 14 out of 101. I bet Bob's read them all.

I may not read much classical literature, but I do have a good time . . .

To my great pleasure, I've suddenly started remembering my dreams again, after a really long dry spell. I used to wake up with what seemed like hours-long, incredibly detailed dreams in my head, which I wrote down long hand in special notebooks. When I say "used to," I'm talking about years ago, maybe ten years ago, or more. As I think about it now, I kind of wonder whether it's all the computer time that has somehow "turned off" that thing that I had for remembering my dreams, whether it was a product of being more in tune with my inner self, maybe from reading more or something like that.

I have a memory of being out of town on business--there was a period in my life during which I traveled quite a bit for work--and staying in a big hotel. I had gotten up, showered and dressed, and was sitting at a little table in front of the window in my room, eating a room service breakfast of croissants and juice, and writing in my dream journal, which at the time was a spiral-bound notebook with a detailed Chinese illustration on the front, in mostly green. This memory is very vivid--I can see the book cover in my mind perfectly well. I'm not sure why this one stuck, but it's a nice one to revisit.

The dreams I wrote down during that period of time were almost like stories, very detailed and long. Now, if I remember my dreams at all, I mostly just remember a feeling, or a few random things, seldom a whole, structured story.

I have a notepad by my bed which, when you pull a pen out from the top, lights up a stack of 3x5 cards that are held in a plastic holder. My eyes are bad enough now without my glasses that the light doesn't really even help, I just sort of scribble blindly, but it's enough to get down a few words when I wake up with a dream in my head.

Last Wednesday I dreamt that Bob traded his van for a motorcycle. Thursday I dreamed about being in a recording studio with Pat Metheny (who I went to high school with), and seeing a sign on the door telling his band members where they could buy chai tea, since they weren't allowed to drink Coke in the studio because the bubbles were too noisy. I'm pretty sure that dream actually relates to my recording artist friend who constantly reminds me that Diet Coke is bad for me, and I should be drinking tea instead.

On Friday I dreamed I was driving home through the country and passed innumerable cars that had been crushed by tree limbs falling on them. I got home, avoiding being crushed, and found that my pantry was full of some kind of flying insects, but I just closed the door and tried to forget about it. In this case, I'm guessing that there is quite a bit of symbolism here that I should think more deeply about, but I'm just going to ignore it . . .