this does not bode well for my day.

I woke up this morning around 4am, but that's not actually the thing. I turned over and went back to sleep, miracle of miracles, and the fact that I remember waking up is how I know I had the following nightmare this morning and not last night.

I dreamed datlowen was dead - stabbed, after trying to pick someone up in the wrong sort of bar in the wrong part of town. I can't remember how I found out about it; when the dream began I already knew. And then I went to his apartment, which of course didn't resemble any place I've ever known him to live, and someone had begun sorting and packing his stuff - part of the reason I'd gone was that I didn't know how we were going to get his things back to his mother, whom I've never met - and out among his belongings was a photograph and a note from my mother, for the police. Apparently I'd been his emergency contact (?!), and when they couldn't reach me they'd called my emergency contact, and my mother had told them I was traveling and unavailable but here was this picture with the two of us in it. (How something my mother put in the US Mail would have reached them before I got off the inter-city bus, in the context of the dream, required no explanation.) Some time later I was talking to my parents and made some reference to datlowen and my father made that sort of face dads make when they're bracing themselves to give you bad news, and I told him I already knew, and I was going to have to work out what to do about traveling to his funeral.

And at that point, as sometimes happens to me when I've dreamed something awful, I woke up in the dream and the awful thing was still true; so that when I woke up for real, I had to lie there for several minutes and convince myself that datlowen is fine, or in any event has not been knifed to death in a bar fight. I still might drop him a line today, but I think I'm done fretting.

Five hours later and having told the whole story, it seems a little silly of me to have been worried. But those of you who have vivid dreams may know what I mean. Right?