I dreamt James Joyce sat in a pub and raised a pint in praise of beer itself. He said, “You’re not so powerful now, but after 11 of you …”

I was in a small club watching Van Morrison sing. He was accompanied by only a guitarist. His performance grew more and more beautiful and soulful. The guitar player was creating percussive bass lines along with his chords, filling out the sound the way a band would.

Later I was driving a car. A. C. was in the passenger seat.

“Are you fucking Van Morrison?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she replied, without hesitation or shame. “About every weekend.”

I considered what this meant in terms of her marriage but didn’t ask anything else.

I was reading some text that said a good way to meditate was to repeat the letters “F-K-C” over and over in a high-speed mantra. In my dream the pronunciation of the letters sounded like “focusy,” meaning “somewhat like focus.” Focusy, focusy, focusy, focusy, I said, and sure enough I fell into a trance. I really felt it. My mind went numb and my vision blurred. I was a little scared, like I was losing control of my thoughts and wasn’t going to be able to get out of it. I thought about the Steely Dan line from “Parker’s Band,” “smacked into a trance.”

We were coming back from somewhere, riding in a van or a school bus, the family and maybe some others—my dad and brother, maybe. We drove past a demonstration of Ferrari Formula One cars, and I was sorry we hadn't known about it, that we'd gone somewhere else instead. There were two cars, driving around a track with banked turns. We watched for a while, amazed by their beauty. They turned into fighter jets. I tried to take pictures and videos of them as they flew past. It was hard to pan fast enough to keep them in the frame. Also, my camera was just a little disc, about two inches in diameter. It was hard to hold it steady between my fingers. There was an indicator when it was shooting video, a flashing symbol, but it wasn't working reliably. At one point a jet flew high, directly overhead. It hovered for a moment and then flew straight down, right at us. I thought I got a video. It crashed near us, causing God knows what damage and loss of life. Apparently the pilot was suicidal. I wondered how often that happened. I imagined how the pilot might have been able to change his mind, to pull up at the last moment and fly just off the ground, scaring people but not killing them.

I was listening to a radio station where the DJ signed off each night by telling listeners to look up in the sky at the two satellites—the satellites that transmitted the station’s signal across the world I guess. I heard him say it and it was poignant, and I felt for the two satellites up there, crisscrossing the sky for us.

I was able to walk up close to the Space Shuttle before a launch. The bottom of it was sitting on an ordinary wooden platform attached to a building, with steps leading up to it. I considered how much fire was going to come out of it soon, and wondered when they would clear the area. There were people milling around, including a matronly woman who seemed to be in charge. She carried away dirty dishes, as though in a restaurant after the lunch rush.

We were getting the band together, or back together. Mike and I went into a bar and auditioned a friend of ours to sing. She stood near the bar and sang an old Irish folk song beautifully. I decided to arrange it as a country song. As we left Mike smoked a cigarette. Later, he and I were hunkered down somewhere, like a strip mall, getting ready to do something or for something to happen. I realized we were holding assault rifles. I got up, alarmed, and told Mike we had to get rid of these guns and leave, or people would think we were terrorists. We hurried out of the parking lot as authorities were swarming in.