I am standing on the train platform with a hundred others shuffling their feet, breath steaming. We are waiting. I stare into the space above the parking lot of the bank on the other side of the station at nothing in particular. It is then that I see it: a huge wolf loping down Main Street, head hunched against the wind, tail dragging, yellow eyes gleaming in the dark. I am startled and look again. I see only a small man in a too-large overcoat, flapping in the brutal wind. His breath is steaming like the rest. So is his cup of coffee. He, too, is heading for the platform.

* * * * *

I let my alarm wake me up this morning. I knew it was coming, but after I sat up in near-panic at 4:30, afraid that I�d forgotten to turn on the alarm (which, of course, I had not. I never do.) I allowed myself to slip back into sleep and had one of those strange early morning, not-quite-asleep dreams.

* * * * *

I was attending a musicology conference with my friend L, who was busy visiting with her colleagues. There were many small scenes there, borrowed from conferences past, but everyone I knew had disappeared or didn�t show up when they were supposed to and I was left alone wandering among strangers. When, after running into my friend S., she invited me to dinner and then abandoned me with two dull people I did not know, I decided to cut my losses and go home. Although I had arrived by plane, I was forced to take a train home. The train went on and on and never seemed to get to my stop. I had to jump off midstream and walk. I came home to what I thought was an empty house. The cat came up to greet me and I sat down on the couch to wait. But I kept hearing footsteps upstairs and it was making me apprehensive, and once I thought I caught a dark shadow sprinting through the kitchen out of the corner of my eye. Had someone broken in? I went up to the kitchen, not sure what I was going to do, and saw a small puppy standing there with the cat. That must have been it. I breathed a sigh of relief until I heard the footsteps again and saw a dark shadow. Suddenly, the shadow came into the light. It was AJ. He had been afraid of the puppy, which his uncle, who was supposed to be watching him, had left to take care of him while he went out.

* * * * *

This is, of course, a classic anxiety dream, playing on both professional and personal anxieties and almost entirely made up of grotesque versions of real life events. But that is not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is what happens when you are jarred out of such a dream by an alarm. You fumble around for what seems like an hour or two to turn off the clock. Then, zombie-like, you grope for your glasses and sweatshirt and try not to fall down the stairs. I am in the kitchen. There is no puppy. There is not even a cat � she is shut in the basement for refusing to stop pouncing on my face in the night. But there are shadows, and there is eerie silence.

Waking mid-dream leaves you suspicious of which part is asleep and which is awake. I know I mentioned this a couple of days ago when discussing my love-hate relationship with my alarm clock, but I�ve been thinking about it a lot lately. It really has nothing to do with my alarm clock. It has to do with my grandmother.

My grandmother has Alzheimer�s and it�s getting rapidly and progressively worse. The greatest part of her experience of the disease is a complete and total breakdown of her ability to tell dream from reality. In fact, it seems like she is dreaming almost all the time, which of course makes her behavior seem totally irrational to others. And unfortunately, many if not most of my grandmother�s dreams seem to be nightmares. She dreams she is pregnant and does not want to be (my grandmother is nearly 81). She dreams she has been taken out to a field where there is a wild and scary party going on and been abandoned there to find her way home. She dreams my mother has died or sometimes my aunt. And sometimes she dreams someone important has died, but doesn�t remember whom. She wakes in the middle of the night and thinks it is daytime and everything seems strange and she is angry that there is no breakfast.

At this point, for my grandmother there is no turning back. And I wonder if we should stop trying to help her be better and start trying to give her better dreams. But how? Once she thought she was on a cruise and once she thought she had gone back to her old home in Michigan, the one I knew as a child. There are good dreams, but not enough of them.

* * * * *

My wolf is sitting downstairs, sipping his coffee and licking his chops, turning the pages of his newspaper with a flick of his tail, his thinning hair vibrating under the breath of the train�s heat.

* * * * *

The more I write, both here and elsewhere, the more I come to believe that the value of writing is not in the writing itself but in the way it makes you see the world, the way you start to inhabit metaphor. It helps me to have a poetic life. But what happens when you can no longer control the poetry, when the poetry turns on you and teases you and is torn from your grasp, possibly by the jaws of a wolf sipping coffee or the hand of an unexpected baby or the cold, retreating back of an unfriendly musicologist?

My dreams are not so different from my grandmother�s. There is fear of abandonment; there is fear of inadequacy; there is just plain fear. But I love those early morning dreams, even the anxious ones, because they give an unusual cast to the day. I always wake feeling more open to possibilities, more aware of the everydayness of the strange. I have an intensity of experience that was the way things were when I was young, but is now increasingly rare. I have come to believe that experience kills it, kills the ease with which we can be open to anything. The difference is that I know how to wake up.

* * * * *

My wolf has fallen asleep beneath his paper. I can see the small sucking motion of the pages over his snout. His seatmate attempts to wake him. His overcoat has slipped to the floor. But the naked wolf, he sleeps on.

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