Random Sequence

Ivan Dreams

The postmodern cowboy/bandit holds an asymmetric handgun in Ivan's dream. "Give me some of your energizing wampum!" the cowboy yells. Ivan realizes that the firearm is only a squirt-gun and smiles with infatuate jolliness. "I don't think so," he drawls with reedy affability. The cowboy scowls and then shrinks into a small cactus with prehensile spines.

Ivan wakes up and begins to write down what he remembers of the dream in the journal he keeps on his bedside table. More crumby eclecticism, he writes, but with some psychogenic particularity. It's the ninth dream he's remembered well enough to record in the last two weeks. A few of them amuse him when he reads about them later in the day. But others disgust him with their overripe absurdity. Still, he's determined to record all of his dreams for the month, as he promised the painter, the "mental portraitist", the dream aficionado....