Frank Zappa owned a record store. Its particularity was that it sold only music that he liked. Avant-garde composers, doo-wop, R&B. Also classic rock—but only what he liked.

I wanted to ask him a question. I tried to get his attention but he turned to another customer, holding up a long, crooked finger to scold me. It was unnaturally long, like a cartoon wizard’s. His demeanor was perfectly aligned with what I'd always heard about him—arrogant, intolerant, demanding.

Finally he turned to me.

“Do you have any Rolling Stones?” I asked. I was apprehensive, afraid he'd scoff, but more so curious. Did Frank Zappa like the Rolling Stones?

“I have The Last Time,” he replied with a slight grimace. In the dream this was an early Stones album, though it's really just an early tune.

I detected his ambivalence. “Yeah, I don't like the early albums as much.” I said. “They didn't really get great until Between the Buttons. Or Aftermath.”

I thought he nodded slightly.

“Or Beggar’s Banquet!” I said excitedly, eager for him to agree. “The early albums are too, you know—jangly.” I grasped for the right words as I searched his face for affirmation. Surely this was a musical characteristic that Frank Zappa would scorn. “They're too strummy.”

Again, he seemed to agree. But maybe not. He didn't reveal much.

A dream about postapocalyptic reality.

Very vivid dream in which I was married to a black woman and we ran an etiquette consulting company together. This somehow evolved into me working on a novel called “Etiquette.” In the dream the story was profound. I kept telling myself to remember it when I woke up, so I could write it in real life. The theme seemed both timely and eternal. Etiquette.

Somehow I was contemplating a career as a racecar driver. I was my real age or close to it—too old—but I thought that if I could borrow some money from my dad I might make a go of it. I had to get into shape, I realized. That would be tough. But not impossible. I’d eat right, train. I’d also have to get out on the track. I’d have to learn how to go flat out everywhere you were supposed to go flat out. Like on the Mulsanne Straight. I’d have to be brave. But I thought there was no reason I couldn’t do it.

We were in a building where Jackie was going to summer camp, probably a big school, with a gym. There was a sign advertising one of the activities: The Circus of the Hope and the Hix and the Dry Flour. “Oh, that kind of flour,” I thought to myself. In the dream I must have thought I’d heard it before and assumed “flower.” Some time after I woke up it occurred to me that Hope Hicks is an actual person, a Trump aide—his PR person, in fact.

Strange dream in which S. and I got to know Ivanka Trump. She was nicer than we expected. It struck me that she was just like everyone else, really.

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.”

We took a trip from somewhere in the Gulf States to Syria to Paris. We realized we couldn’t take Syrian Airways because “Bashar Al-Assad runs the country.” Sara was wearing a headdress and her face was painted light blue.

Later I took a psychedelic drug, and as has happened in other dreams I felt it coming on very, very strong. I was tripping like crazy.