17.II.84

Dear Angel of Dust,

I got a chance to talk with Penguin and I asked him about the dream. He says yes, he has dreamt it, more than once in fact, but he wouldn’t go so far, he says, as to say it’s about Drennette. The “certain someone” in the dream when he’s dreamt it, he says, looks nothing like Drennette and doesn’t, in the way she speaks, walks, carries herself and so on, resemble Drennette. “Anyway,” he said emphatically, “I haven’t dreamt that dream in a very long time. I dreamt it two or three times, the last about five or six months ago. Since then it seems to have gone away or been put away, like a tune a band retires from its book.” I was struck by the analogy. He too, as soon as it left his lips, appeared to be struck by it, pausing as if hearing an echo of it, giving it further thought. “How strange,” he went on to say, “that it popped up again, not to mention getting dreamt by someone else.”

Why me? He couldn’t help wondering nor could I. Is it my listening to his going on about Drennette, his bending my ear the way he so often has, my sitting still for it? Did that do it, did that open me up in some way? Did that in some way make me a surrogate or a host? “It’s not about Drennette,” he shot back when I asked out loud. “Of course not,” I said, not wanting to make an issue of it, and went on to wonder, again out loud, what order of dream transfer it was we were dealing with, dream theft, dream contagion or what. Neither Penguin nor I could help recalling Dredj’s dream, its roundabout exchange with “Dream Thief,” ideas of dream transit, dream transport, crowding in on us. Was Dredj the connection, we wondered, the conduit, Penguin’s dream’s way into my sleep? Yes, that was it we agreed.

We no sooner agreed than Penguin looked at me and said, “Getting back to Drennette, whom it’s not about, or getting back, I should say, to it not being about Drennette, I need to say about ‘a certain someone’ that she’s the one we have that we don’t have or the one we had that we don’t have, the one we have by not having, that we have to have without having. You being new to this, I need to tell you she’s the one whom to have would be not to have, to have let slip away in a presumption of having.” He stopped as though winded by what he’d said, as though it were an hour-long speech he’d finished. I found myself set back, silent, not knowing what to say, and when he gathered himself again, got his wind back, he said, simply repeating himself, “I tell you this because you’re new to it.” He paused a beat before adding, “I haven’t dreamt that dream in ages.”

I wasn’t sure anymore. I thought maybe I’d agreed too soon, settled on Dredj as the connection too quickly. Maybe, to begin with, “Why me?” isn’t the question. What if Lambert dreamt the dream too, like the time the three of us dreamt the Djeannine dream? Maybe this was us dreaming a collective dream again, staggered instead of dreamt at the same time, and if Lambert hasn’t dreamt the dream, could it be that he just hasn’t dreamt it yet?

It may turn out to be inconclusive, I know, but I need to speak with Lambert and I’m going to speak with him next.

As ever,
N.