Could the contours of the self be so porous that one only really remembers dreams when waking alone?

Enough about one, more about me. When I wake beside someone I am sharing my life with in some capacity, the other seeps into my consciousness immediately upon waking. Only when I feel (unconsciously, calmly, truthfully) alone in the world do the dreams seem to hover there in front of my mind's eye.

The poet Kabir said, "Wake up! There is no one in the bed next to you." For much of these past seven years I've woken with the illusion that yes, of course there is someone sleeping in the bed next to me. Kabir is trying to say that this is an illusion.

The past couple days, sleeping in a separate room, after our official break-up, I've slept on a fouton mattress in a 7-by-9 room ten feet away from her, with a closed door between us. Waking there has made the difference for these dreams.

Two days ago I was writing a poem and frying a cheese-and-lime-juice sandwich on a grill beside the stage at La Traviata. The sandwich was going to be so delicious, and the poem was a keeper too. But a copper forced me out of there. A new friend burst in with a face of sunshine and said, "How's the poem?"

"It's a good one," I said, but the copper kept leading me away from my sandwich. He was a short Latino dude who seemed to be on a power trip, but he was armed, what could I do. Before leaving the theater, I went up to a big black cop and said, "What about my sandwich?"

He pointed down toward my grill, and with that sanction I jumped down the steps toward that little spot to the right of the stage, so I could eat my sandwich dripping with lime juice and write my poem, which was in my head but not written down.

It went like this:

I want to go out like the Florida Marlins, I said.
In six games? he said.
No, I said.
With Kevin Millar swinging? he said.
No, I said.
Running low on funds and selling all your best? he said.
No, I said.
He wouldn't listen, but I wanted to tell him I'd just learned how the marlin goes out, a slow dissolve with a blue glow in the brain, the last thing to go.


But the little cop would not stop pestering me. "Sir!" he said. "Sir!" It was clear I would never get my sandwich nor my poem, and it was also clear that when you hit this level of rule-enforcement you're already swimming in fascism.