After awakening but before getting up this morning, I fell into two brief naps that immediately became dreaming REM sleep. In the first, I crossed some gravel parking lots toward the back porch of an unfamiliar rental house in Bloomington. As I did so, a 1960s pastel aquamarine flake stretch limo with both rumble seats and additional strap-in seats on the rear bumper pulled up, and my sister Suzy, dead since 1988, popped out, running into the house excitedly and shouting a hello, and responding to my what the hell is going on by gesturing at the limo and shouting “that’s my Lyft!”

As I approached the house I noticed all of my guitars, basses, banjos, violins, and mandolins were set up on stands in the yard. I grabbed my favorite florentine and started pickin’ as I walked up the steps to the porch. For some reason the pick I had to hand was a flexi old-style Fender resin tortie and it immediately overheated and raised a burr which kept catching and fucking up my sustains. I was sufficiently distracted by this that I walked into the house without looking around to see who was there.

John Terrill greeted me effusively, guiding me through a packed session including maybe fifteen players, basically none from a folk tradition but including Mark McWhirter, who was very happy to see me, and I think Jim Manion and other people I know or have known.

John told me he wanted me to play the saudade, which in this dream was a thumb piano, not a style of Portuguese song and poetry, and handed me a gourd with a rack of two ranks of three metal vibrating tone producers, plugged it into a damaged Silvertone amp, and told me I had to hit it just right, man, just right.

So I did, and it was great, and I woke up experiencing seizure-like spasms in my arms and legs and was extremely dizzy.

I got some water and went back to bed, amused. I nearly immediately fell asleep again, and was in the back of a large van jouncing over crappy roads as I at first repeatedly attempted to organize a stack of vintage flyers in chronological order and then to perform something similar with a stack of mixed-source trading cards, becoming grouchier and grouchier as the vehicle’s juddering repeatedly made my task impossible. I exited the van for lunch or something and ran into an old coworker whom I was happy to see but less happy to spend time with, said coworker having a difficult personality. I hugged him, said good bye, and awakened again to flailing limbs and dizziness.