Dear AOC Friends,

A few weeks ago I had one of those profound dreams that appear about every seven years in my life. My last one was the day after Thanksgiving 2004 when I fell into an elevator pit and lived. This dream was no nightmare.

Plunging to my certain death I consoled myself that the end would come swiftly and painlessly, the lights turned out on my life with a flick of the switch. The dream wasn’t a nightmare, but a sleep moment that left me calm, self-possessed and empty enough of anxiety that I saw the white fluffies appearing on the walls of the cement tomb.

Down, down I plummeted as the white moss grew into a dense web of a white snowstorm in my death tomb. So thick that I could run my hand over it, the moment of enlightenment came with an intense rational sensation that I would not die, and I would hit bottom.

Saved, chosen, spared, innocent …  I was falling into a web, a trampoline affair but softer and cocoon-like, a bed of hay made instead of fair-trade cotton or fresh snow, lying to rescue me at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Hitting bottom I composed my very alive and still-dreaming self and then saw a trap-door in the wall, an exit out of the elevator shaft. Reaching for the black lever, I yanked open the top and bottom sheets of metal, and walked onto a picnic table.

Typing on her laptop was the girl I knew well, the one who dreamed of moving to New York and becoming a writer. In prior dreams, she was older, more my age, a dear friend and sisterly confidante.

This day, she barely noticed me. Looking up, she kept typing on her Mac Powerbook, with barely a nod, let alone a smile. We exchanged brief acknowledgements eye to eye, as I walked across the tabletop, stepping down to the bench, and onto the floor.