Rates of Exchange, Chapter 3

I dreamed of fire. A house. And a lake. The fire was set in the grass but it burned the wrong way when the wind changed. I don't know why the fire was set. Firefighters came. Nobody was in the house; everyone had left the house the day before. It burned to the ground. There was a child's tricycle in the bedroom in my dream, but it was out of sequence - I saw it after the fire - unburned - but it was an image of a condition which could only have existed before the fire.

I woke up and thought about the images. Trying not to let them fade. I read somewhere that the memory of dreams fade quickly because they originate and exist in a temporary neurological mechanism; to be made permanent they must be re-routed through different cognitive centres of the brain. I know a carny who keeps a notebook under his pillow to record his dreams in. Unsatisfied with its proximity to his dreams in its place beside his bed in his trailer , he told me that he felt that with the book moved that much closer to his head, it would be easier to get the dreams down - they would already be imprinted on the page in some more lasting version of the ephemeral and he would only have to trace the pen over lines already written. He showed me an old cardboard suitcase full of notebooks. Full of his dreams. For a moment, it shimmered and undulated with the power of one subconscious, recorded, collected all in one place.


The fire department was here early this morning. Before dawn. The smoke alarm woke me up and I walked out on to the balcony. I looked across the "U" and saw Frank pulling some smoldering curtains out of a room on the far end. and the firemen arrived about thirty seconds later. My body bucked for a second when I remembered the dream. Was I dreaming about me and Frank and the job two years ago? It seemed a crude metaphor. Or was my subconscious just warning me about the fire in the hotel? I brushed that away in a self-conscious moment. Who's fooling who, here? I know why I'm here, I'm just not sure how I'm to go about it. That makes the dream more likely an augury. Or maybe my conscience is talking; I've kept her at a distance so far but college has just made her sharper, more in focus. maybe it was a bad move to...

This is all pointless - I don't need to know about what Frank was doing at 4 am. I don't need to figure out what she really wanted to do with Lyman's Cat. I only need to figure out the how of the immediate future. Long-fermenting intent brought me here - intent will carry me beyond the immediate. Right now, within the next 24 hours, what I need is a plan for the immediate.