My Music Journal 2025: January 30, 2025

 

Time: 5:00 AM
Song: All Night Long
Artist: Lionel Richie
Mode of Consumption: Radio Alarm  

Link to song: https://open.spotify.com/track/2Wb9ejnmy27DUTUe9YF5Ew?si=e79463ef1dc74470

The voice of a radio announcer interrupts the silence. It’s dark, and the voice gives way to song. Jodi gets up. I roll over, listen until the chorus, oh it’s Lionel Richie. Maybe I should write about this, I think, and then fall back to sleep.

I’m renowned for vivid dreams. Occasionally I sleepwalk.

The dream begins.

I have retrieved the mail, but I’m not at home. At least not initially. I feel like I am at my grandparents’ old farmhouse. Their living room. A pair of recliners with an end table between them and a lamp. It’s more a sense of place than a physical location.

The mail has two items for me. Two packages, and I intuit that they are books. Perhaps books I have been published in, short story collections or something.

I open the first, a thick tome. Flip through the first pages, scanning for my name. There are pictures, almost like a graphic novel. I have no memory of submitting to a place like this.

There is an envelope with a note that spans several small pieces of blue paper and a bounced check. It’s a check from me, but it’s from the bank I had in DeKalb in college, an account long closed.

“They’ve just now tried to cash this?” I speak, and I don’t know if there is anyone else there.

I never submitted stories to publishers when I lived in DeKalb. How did they get this check?

I try to read the letter, but all the small pieces of blue paper have scattered across the room, and the pieces I find are filled with an elegant gibberish. Is that possible? Elegance in a note that seems to mean nothing.

Now there are empty cardboard boxes and toys and other trinkets scattered about the room, making it harder to find all of the note. Who is this from? What do they want?

That senseless frantic panic sets in. The panic that lives in dreams where everything, even something so insignificant as getting mailed a book and an old check elevate the heartbeat and blood pressure beyond healthy levels. It’s a panic that feels the press of time more than the waking senses. The one that senses the clock. Knows that it’s ticking down. When I wake this world will be no more, probably forgotten, definitely lost.

I toss aside boxes, squint at shreds of paper, make nothing of the note. I am untethered from place, consumed by my goal.

Then I hurdle forward beyond the dream and into the world.

It’s 5:45 AM. Time to get up.