Devine Dreams

I always know when I have failed to take my antidepressants before bed: I have almost preternaturally vivid dreams, shot through and riven with melancholy in remembrance. The last time this happened I dreamt that I was teaching on the Isle of Skye, which in my dream was between Denmark and Sweden, but still a British territory. I walked from the quaint house I was renting to the University library to return some interlibrary loan books, but a huge line forced me to wait for hours . . .

But last week I had a more conventional dream, in that when I awoke and remembered parts of it, I was merely puzzled, not suffering from the "agenbite of inwit," as Stephen Dedalus calls it. Some of the people in the dream were people I work with--there was a picnic by the river--and who should appear but Andy Devine. I remember telling him in my dream how much I enjoyed his work as Jingles on Wild Bill Hickock (I always suck up to celebrities in dreams), and then I asked him what he was doing still alive (it must have been 2007 in my dream). He answered that he was born in 1930, and so I said, "Then you were nine years old when you appeared in Stagecoach"? That's all I remember.

But: why Andy Devine? As a comical sidekick on a 1950s TV Western, he wasn't--to me--on a par with Pat Brady in Roy Rogers or Pat Buttram in Gene Autry. And how did I remember in the dream the year Stagecoach appeared, or even that he was in it? Gate of horn, gate of ivory: dreams are still impenetrable.

"And somebody spoke and I went into a dream."