This is just the tail end of a long night of complicated dreams. I woke up and fell back asleep and dreamt this:

I'm the President's wife, visiting relatives back home. It's crowded and busy, chaotic. Like a fair--contests, pies, a big clothing swap. Is it a 4th of July celebration?

I get tired and go in the house and fall asleep, and have a dream-within-the-dream.

The President's been killed.

As First Lady, I'm next in the line of succession. But I don't WANT to be President! Then I realize that I could simply refuse the position. There will be great pressure not to, but if I'm stubborn I can abdicate. After all, the Vice President is next in line...

...and he's Bill Clinton. He'd be delighted to take the job!

"White House here" says the secretary on the other end of the line. I'm curiously formal, saying "This is Mrs. ___" instead of "It's Alder" or "It's the First Lady." I start to explain I had a dream warning of a possible assassination attempt on my husband... but there's an excited commotion in a room off the hallway, distracting me.

I peer through the doorway, and see a bare room; just carpet and a desk and a big antique open-tub washing machine sitting on the rug, starting its cycle. Whoever was oohing and aaahing at the washer is gone. In front of the machine are half a dozen brilliantly colored plastic tubs, from red through the spectrum to violet, in rainbow order. Transparent plastic tubes connect them all, and soapy water's flowing from tub to tub (and dripping on the carpet). Is it some kind of filtration system?

I'm so distracted and bewildered by this lurid machinery that I can't tell the White House secretary a coherent story. I try a couple of times and wake, still having failed to warn my husband...

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Fourth of July celebration: I plan to go to a big family gathering on the Fourth, day after tomorrow.
• My husband: I'm single.
• Bill Clinton: well, doesn't it sound like Bill?
• Phone number: my housemate teased me today that I didn't know the phone number at my workplace, when even he did. I said "But why should I know it? I don't call myself there!"
• Strange washing machine, tubs: our washing machine drains through a hose into a big industrial sink
• Dripping on the carpet: the sink clogged yesterday, flooding the garage.
• Rainbow colored tubs: today I saw Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World", about Antarctic researchers. Their labs and camps were full of scuba gear, pipes and tanks, often brightly colored for visibility.

EDITOR'S NOTE

On the morning of July 3rd, as soon as I woke up and wandered out into the kitchen of our co-op house, Alder told me this dream. I was shocked.

You see, I've been reading Gore Vidal's historical novel LINCOLN, and late last night, for no reason, I jumped ahead from page 200 to the end. Vidal's last line speculates that Lincoln took few precautions against assassination out of guilt over the war--that he accepted death as an atonement. I had already known that two weeks before his death, Lincoln dreamed he'd be assassinated. I flipped back until I found that passage in the book, and then went to bed...

To wake up to Alder's story of a warning dream of a Presidential assassination!

--Chris Wayan

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