His & Hers

I've had a few recurring dreams in my lifetime, and I've been fond of them all: I have written elsewhere how all of these involve houses, and how house dreams are really about your own inner world, and so the nicest thing is to fall asleep and find myself there. Whenever I reemerge into one of those rooms, I always check to see what's new since I was there last, what is the same, what I had failed to notice before.

A new one of these, and a new type, has appeared on night's landscape, however, and although I've only had it twice, still, that makes it recurring, and I am uneasy now lest it come back again. This one is not about a house. The problem, in the dream, is simple: I need to call Buck, and someone hands me a phone. I start to punch in the numbers and find that on the phone I have been given, there is no number "3." (In the morning, when I will phone him for his usual wake-up call and tell him about this, Buck's real phone number will contain the numeral three three different times. You begin to understand the difficulty in the dreamscape.)

I fret all day: is it an unlucky omen? The dream seems poisonous. Buck tells me that the next time I'm near a pay phone, I should pry the little metal cap off the numeral 3 and put it in my pocket. That way, he says, you'll always have a spare. The night he tells me this, Buck has this dream: he has been given a box full of strips of cloth; they are an inch or so wide and about a foot long. They are all sorts of colors, but one color--by morning he can no longer remember which--is missing, and in the dream he looks and looks through the strips for the color that is not there...

...which he does not find, and that sets me into a tizzy: these dreams are bad omens, I am sure of it. Not at all, he replies, it just means that something's missing, and what's missing is you being with me and me being with you. It seems so obvious when he says it. Why is it, I wonder next, that I live in the grasp of an imagination that itself seems to have no such grasp of the obvious?