I came upon a journal that my grandfather had written about my grandmother’s mental problems. In real life she’d been an alcoholic and a depressive, but in the dream it was something more debilitating. He described her as having the faculties of a child. He wrote in the kind of old-fashioned cursive you’d find on a banquet menu. As I read a few pages it occurred to me for the first time that he was ashamed of her.
Then I was in some kind of class where we were to take turns performing an anecdote or a stand-up routine. I hadn’t prepared enough. I had written down a few ideas but I wasn’t sure how to elaborate on them. One was “that time I saw a piece of construction equipment explode in front of me.” One of those “tank-like things with a plow.”