Anxiety

In a dream I was asked if I would interview papersky . Sure, I said.

Now, said the dream. In French.

What?

Oh, we'll give you the questions. Just read them.

And I was pushed out onto a platform in a steep steep lecture room full of vociferous French university students, already on their feet and arguing.

I stood at the focus, like the body for dissection.

And the paper I had was in English, to be rendered on the fly. They were knotty questions, stiff considerations of philosophy, of the nature of time and space. All subjunctive at the very least.  And as I stood trying to remember the French for, say, tachyon, and was it du or de la, the words kept dancing on the page, as they will in dreams, shifting and reforming sentences.  I kept losing what I'd just remade.

The crowd was getting supercilious. Five hundred Sartres and de Beauvoirs.

And to my horror, I was wearing an orange dress. A lysergic print chiffon, and worse, a fragile, borrowed dress, too tight across the bodice and the long restrictive sleeves. And already I'd torn it, trailing yards of petticoat, a taffeta that rustled like the crowd...

Nine