DREAM CONVENTION I went to the dream convention. People unpacked their dreams from little satchels called their minds. Upon the convocation I heard dreams of the past, of Jackie Wilson and of Cecil B. Moore; dreams of the future sounding like little Philip K. Dick novels; dreams of the young; of the old. Whole dialogues were conducted in dream states, in imaginations of other times and places. One woman had just taken a swing down South and was full of old plantations, Spanish moss hanging, and dark forbidding pine forests. Others communicated their higher states, reached through intoxication, meditation, yoga, or tai chi. I dreamt of St. Louis, Oklahoma, the Rocky Mountains, of sheer violence and of the deep love found within the humid clefts of women. I let these dreams roll off my tongue like ululations,

as my breath hastened to a gallop. We exchanged little mementos of our dreams. Small books, single poems, diminutive drawings and watercolors. The music rumbled on in the background as someone sang of a better place, and a lover, and a soft, warm bed overlooking the sea. It was an afternoon, or was it a lifetime, or an eternity? Who could say that it wasn’t infinite? At the conclusion we packed up our dreams, walked out of them, ready to go our separate ways and make the long evening’s commute back to reality. But by now our dreams had spilled out into what had been reality just a few hours earlier. There was no longer any separating the two. We had belched forth our reveries with such fortitude, that the waking world was now filled with our dreams and they were finally no longer merely segregated by our slumbers.

Peter Baroth