Novel ideas

For me, my muse has lately been coming not from a clinking glass but from solitude and dreams.

The fact of the matter is I've become something of a hermit since New Year's, only opening the door to let the dogs out or to stick out my arm to grab the mail. And it's because of this isolation, I think, that my (always lucid) dreaming has evolved into entire mental manuscripts of fiction. Each night my bedtime comes later and later, mostly now around four to five in the morning. Then, depending on how interesting the story is getting, I get up around noon.

The oddest part of this is not that it often takes me days to fully realize the dream didn't actually happen but that, when I finally had to emerge from this strangely productive hibernation in order to meet with my accountant over my income taxes, what followed has me having a difficult time believing wasn't a dream.

After leaving the accountant, I decided the outside world wasn't such a bad place after all so I stopped to get a newspaper and a booth at the local cafe. It was Monday so, with most stores closed in this tourist town, it was empty enough inside that I could listen to the conversations at the counter.

There's a sense of calm that comes from a place of rattling plates in the busboy's tray, the "What can I get you?" and the rhythmic stirring of coffee cups. It's even better in winter with snowflakes littering the sidewalk outside the fogged up windows and woolen hats and scarfs hanging on the coat racks.

Before I'd finished my first cup of coffee, a man with wild brown hair came in, shut the door behind him and headed for a small table by the opposite wall. He sat down, opened a satchel and took out a sheet of white paper as waitresses walked by with steaming pots of coffee and calls of, "Hi Tom," one adding, "Be with you in a minute."

I watched as he sat, head bent over so far that his nose was inches off the piece of paper flat on the table before him. Every few minutes he'd pick it up and squint at it and I could see that it was blank except for a few small squarish chunks of lines that came down from the upper left corner.

I'd seen the guy before, walking down the hill to town, smoking cigarettes and holding that satchel in his arms, one of the group-home-guys as they came to be known. But now he was "Tom" - and maybe even a poet. I had to know.

When I finished my coffee and went over to pay the bill, I stopped by his table, "Excuse me," I asked, "is that a poem?"

"Yes, yes it is."

Tom offered to let me read it and apologized for how small the font was.

"Why don't you make it bigger?"

"I like it that way," he said.

I learned that Tom grew up a town away from mine and went on to study philosophy at Williams College, then Rutgers for the graduate program in English. He lasted a week, then the paranoia set in.

So here I'd had the pleasure of meeting one of the group-home-guys who happens to write incredibly brilliant poetry in a font size so small it is barely perceptible.

And it's still hard for me not to believe that this was the dream - and the actual real dream I had this morning wasn't. In it I went to a real estate open house at the home where a schoolmate of mine and her little boy were stabbed to death by her husband. (The stabbings were horribly real. It was the open house that was the dream.) From room to room I recalled the newspaper account.

"The police discovered the five-year-old's body in the kitchen covered in blood." I stood in the kitchen looking down at the floor.

"His little brother, barely alive, was found under the coffee table in the living room." No coffee table now. Just a spotless beige carpet.

"The woman was dead in the basement." My mind drew a yellow chalk outline.

"Out back, he jumped out of the bushes wielding a knife and was shot to death by Patrolman Peterson." I didn't make it to the backyard.

I told the realtor she'd never sell it. The only thing left was to reduce it to rubble and make it disappear.

I wish Tom could find it in himself to write bigger.