When I set out to learn about my mother's bridge club, the Jewish octogenarians behind the matching outfits and accessories, I never expected to fall in love with them. This is the story of the ladies, their game, their gen, and the ragged path that led me back to my mother.
Last night I dreamt that I called a very big deal editor and pitched a project on climate change. She said, I think it’s been done. A LOT. I said that it was a book about inside climate change. And she said, Good luck with that. Then I had another dream where an editor (who I hate in real life) tried to snub me at a party when a big celebrity entered the room and asked me to leave with her. Dr, Freud?
Do you interpret your dreams?
Credit: Freud Museum
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Betsy Lerner 
Yes. I have a notebook next to my bed. Lately I haven’t remembered anything. I’ll keep trying. Daylight savings time is playing havoc with my sleep.
No, not really. I usually look to my real life to see what prompted the dream. A person I’d been thinking about. Hearing of someone’s death. I rarely remember dreams so it’s kinda cool to wake up and remember.
Yup.
“Do you interpret your dreams?”
Sometimes. Mostly my dreams are ad hoc assemblages of memory fragments being organized in interlinked cubbyholes, in much the same way a computer hard drive runs its defragmenting and optimization subroutines during off-hours (often the same off-hours in the deep of night, when we sleeping humans run our own, which we call dreams).
Some of my dreams, not many, are lengthier, more structured, with a narrative bent. Not infrequently I make use of such dreams as frames for composing stories. I think three of my more recently published stories were derived from dreams. There are usually problems or glitches in such raw materials that need to be addressed in turning them into prose narratives, but it’s like with any other composition, it’s just a matter of working with the material, getting it into shape. I never say, “Dear Editor, this story is derived from a dream.” That’s an off-putter, for sure. The dream, the source, the derivation, these are not the point. I don’t invite gawkers into my workshop. The point is in capturing the reader’s attention with a story that has a certain mysterious, ethereal quality.
Usually my dreams set me off-kilter – a pigment of some weird landscape. But I can’t remember them. I know they’re there, like ghosts holding some mysterious key to my psyche. I dream, I wake, I forget.
Yes, I interpret some of my dreams, and it does not matter if I am wrong because I do not base my waking actions and attitudes on my dreams. The writer in me loves dreams, mine and others. Freud taught us some of the profound connections between dreams and literature, so why should writers waste the opportunity to learn? An absurdist dream teaches us more than does reading an ordinary realistic short story, I think.
I usually try and write them down but sometimes, or more usually my mind kicks into lets get on with the day mode and I forget to remember. You were in one of my dreams, but I don’t know what you look like, but hey, in dreams that doesn’t matter.