Reveille

After my open heart surgery this March I have oftentimes awakened in a dream state.  I once had a friend who dreamed every night in which he was participant in elaborate narratives so intriguing that he was loathe to awake.  I envied him that, but these were no match.  In my dreams I am always fleeing pursuers and in escaping them I take the last desperate maneuver of waking up, and dissolving the narrative plane in which they are embedded, a cheap trick of narrative which always embarrasses me when I realize that I am no longer in the dream.  The angry pursuit and my frightened flight often seems somehow connected with the male companions with whom I went to high school or maybe junior high--they seem younger.  That saddens me when i reflect on it when once awake.  I thought I had successfully mastered that crowd back in the day, becoming quite the popular lad in my class, indeed, in my school.  Quite rationally I know that I was a natural object of hate for fourteen year old males whose normal instincts were being challenged by my insinuating homosexual vibes and whose priests and parents no doubt thundered out a message of damnation for the likes of me.  Still over those months of 1945 and 1946 I brought an energetic magic to making myself attractive and entertaining, and succeeded utterly.  So it is interesting to know that the fun and laughter and camaraderie inspired by my wit and glamor had this underpinning of fear, flight, and desperation. A half hour ago I woke unaccountably in a refugee camp, a Jewish boy, with a big cap on my head, such as one saw in Life magazine articles devoted to the plight of European Jews back in the late thirties, early forties.  I was leaning against a hill, exhausted, surrounded by others who were cooking food over an open fire, repacking satchels, while still others leaned against the edge of the hill peeking over the top as watchmen, I suppose.  I felt desperate, and looked to my left which I always did when I was caught in nightmare circumstances and dimly perceived the white frame of the door that went into my bathroom where the figure of Botticelli's Primavera glowed on the painted shade of a night light. Safe!  When I finish typing this I am going back to bed, turn off my bedside light, try for a bit more sleep, so as to dispel, the deeply unsettling mood that has attended me from my dream state into this darkened early morn