After last night dining with David and Kate and Maggie and talking about dreams, I this morning dreamed something of a version of a dream that recurred for a long stretch of my adolescence. Or at least a recurring object, the events of the old dream didn't recur.

It's a triangular book, somehow having a spine along each edge, making it a single book that can be opened three ways. If you open it one way, everything becomes fire -- not that everything is on fire, everything is made of living, raging fire, all substance comprises fire. As if the periodic table had only one element on it -- fire. Another way of opening the book makes everything water in this way, and the third way makes everything wind. It's not a wonderful thing, it's awful. The fire in particular. Actually I remember the wind was kind of wonderful, the feeling of it. The other two were like being perpetually held in the exact moment of burning or drowning to death. The book is old and leatherbound and has bulky clasps on it like the book in raiders of the lost ark that indiana jones shows the government guys the pictures in of beams of eradicating power coming from the ark.

So last night I dreamed I was on a city bus at night with this book sitting in my lap with my hands folded on top of it. It was very cold and my shoes were wet. The lights at the back of the bus were flickering, the fluorescent bulbs were on the fritz. A bunch of boys around 8 or 9 years old were crowded together sitting on the rear seat of the bus, shoving each other playfully and laughing, which annoyed me. I wanted it quiet. For some reason I had to maintain great concentration in order to not open the book, I needed to keep myself from opening the book. If my attention to this wavered, I would sort of automatically or reflexively open the book, like a pair of hands would with any book on one's lap on a bus at night, not even to read it, just to hold a book open in one's hands for the bus ride. I wondered why these obnoxious kids were out at night unchaperoned. And in my head I made an image of raising my hand in front of me and bringing it slowly down like a karate chop, and this bifurcated my ability to concentrate so I could continue to keep myself from opening the elemental book while using the cleaved-off new chunk of concentration to direct some slow-motion-ness power at the boys in the back. It was like I split my eyes off of each other. My right eye was able to look straight down at the book on my lap, watching my hands to make sure they didn't open it. And my left eye was swiveled up and away toward the boys. They slowed to half speed and quarter speed and were still horsing around but now they sounded low and slurred and echoey so they didn't bother me hardly at all. The lights kept flickering at regular speed though, and the image of the boys was kind of smeared like low-res video.

Anyway it worked, I didn't open the book.