Some would say that there is no grammar of sleep.  I would have to disagree.  I often parse the grammar of sleep. These “dream” narratives are driven by moods of verbs:  the indicative mood of the verb (“I read”), the subjunctive mood (“I would read”), the infinitive mood (“to read); and the imperative mood (“Read!”)

Struggle 26 is one of my common sleep narratives.  The first time I opened this “book,” I tossed and turned.  Couldn’t I escape the struggle in the dream, before my whole life became a struggle?  Because when you struggle to sleep, when you’ve tried everything, when you’ve eaten turkey as a sleep aid, drunk warm milk, done yoga, and nothing works?  You would be surprised at how lack of sleep slows your responses. 

Struggle 26: I struggled over whether to stay in a college town I loved, completely resigned to underemployment, or move to a city to become an underpaid professional.  Which choice did I make?  Was it a good choice?  Was it the wrong choice?  Can “I struggle” become “I refuse to struggle”?  Should “I struggled” have become “Keep struggling!”? 

Struggle 26 was neither a dream nor a narrative. It was the imperative of a verb, a command:  “Struggle!”

 Mind you, these sleep narratives are not real books, and have a different meaning for every “reader.”  They are dream books.  They form a kind of narrative of sleep, if sleep had a narrative, which is improbable, nay, impossible, if your dreams ramble like mine.    Dreams do not tell what I call a coherent story.  They are more like broken myths.  They make half sense, have a half life.

A dream I have had over and over I call The House of Sleep. Perhaps it was the house of sleep because I seldom got there.  In my first dream I opened a book.  It was an old-fashioned album, filled with pictures of houses I’d never seen, captions I’d never read.  The first picture: I am sitting in front of a cottage on a beach, cackling over a book. Judging from the laughter, it is Cornelius Otis Skinner’s The Ape in Me.

But then  I turned a page and was panicked by a photo of myself, older, silver-haired, unrecognizable, in fact, except for my awareness that this was, or would be my future self. I was surrounded by lexicons and grammars, translating a cache of lovely new Latin poetry discovered by an archaeologist (were the poems real, or fake?) and given to me to read. But when that task was done, I would be given clay tablets written in a nonexistent, magical language. Why me? Why why why? Tolkien? Star Trek? What was I thinking?

Then I realized I could translate the nonsense if I MADE MY WAY TO A 24-HOUR GLASS RECTANGULAR EXTERIOR SMOKING LOUNGE at Indiana University Library, where I did some of my best work.

This lounge, however, no longer exists.

And then I remember my most important dream: Struggle 26.