Not-yet-published pieces, stories, essays, rants, and random strangenesses

My job has me writing a lot each week: weekly newsletters, press releases, editorials, forwards and introductions to books—that sort of...

My parents are appearing in my dreams with disturbing frequency now. After my father died in 1982, I saw him in dreams and dream-states...

Someone once asked if I took hallucinogens before bedtime. I said no, but I’m beginning to think there’s something in the water. Last...

Disturbing dreams last night; in fact, they rattled me so much that I remember ordering the dream to stop at one point. Mom and Dad and I...

Jim Morrison wrote “Strange Days,” the song, for The Doors’ album of the same name, in 1967. The album was considered an artistic...

I am not a particularly heavy sleeper. You could say I sleep like a dog, or a wolf; that is, with one ear nearly always awake, ready to...

I’ve been waking up lately with my head crammed with a bunch of disjointed thoughts. That in itself is not unusual; my head is a...

It’s 4 a.m., and I’m in Florence, South Carolina, on my way north to perform the second of Mom’s two funerals. I spent a surprisingly...

Okay, I think I must have been in one of those what-cha-ma-call-ems: a fugue state, or something. But in my drafts folder I found this...

In the seventh grade, we were taught Modern Math. My teacher, a man with a thick Southern accent whose face looked like one of those...

A frequent motif in my dreams is where I step into a life I am (or someone else is) currently living elsewhere, to taste what that life...

An odd two-part dream last night. In the first part, friends haven’t heard from me for a week or more contact my brother, who has keys to...

One of my recurring nightmares involves a scenario in which there are several dogs in my care, usually one large and several smaller...

A recurring dream, which last night became a nightmare: I’m in a house that looks vaguely like my own, only it’s filthy. There’s a vague...

My friend Kate lived for several years in Yuma, Arizona, and worked as an environmental lawyer on an Army base. She and her fiancé Ken...

When I was five, I knew I had a remarkable power. I could fly. Sometimes I’d sit on top of the stairs leading down to the basement,...

My first shock was the realization that Kyle, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where I was to meet with Vincent Blackfeather,...

This was one of those dreams that I can’t decipher, and I’m not certain it really wants deciphering. I’m only posting it because in the...

Dreams are such peculiar things. They come in a few different varieties. There are ones that are the flotsam and jetsam of the mind,...