I woke up an hour ago, about 5:30, hav­ing just dreamed about about Tom Cruise. What is upset­ting is that the dream was­n’t. If this were an off-the-shelf homo­erot­ic slog, I would­n’t both­er to write. I woke up feel­ing calm and warm. My skin was warm. That’s my def­i­n­i­tion of a good dream. Just now, I hear Oskar in the bath­room shut­ting off the show­er and dry­ing off, and I can feel an anx­i­ety rat­tle around inside — soon he’ll be dressed and out here and what’s left of that dream will atom­ize into the ether. 

I was inside a big old house, a shab­by Crafts­man with dusty wood floors and hazy win­dow light. There were a few of us, men and women, liv­ing togeth­er or work­ing togeth­er there. It was morn­ing, and we were all try­ing to get the house sort­ed so we could get on with the day, though what that day promised is already lost. Tom Cruise comes in the kitchen to make cof­fee and break­fast. Not for every­body, just for him­self. He’s run­ning late. He’s Tom Cruise, the actor, so we’re prob­a­bly work­ing on a film. Am I the writer ? The direc­tor ? I don’t know. 

The last time I had a direct­ing dream was the night before the first day of shoot­ing on Per­ma­nent Mid­night (or prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy, as Eric Jon­rosh would say). In that dream, I was lin­ing up a com­pli­cat­ed night shot, and Bob Yeo­man, Gen­tle­man Cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, Esq., came over to tell me that Stephen Spiel­berg was vis­it­ing the set. Oh, and that I was naked. That’s right. I had a dream of direct­ing a shot entire­ly naked while the direc­tor’s direc­tor observed. Spiel­berg came over and said, of course, that I did­n’t seem to know what I was doing. I woke up in a sweaty funk with a deep awful cough, and when I got in my car to dri­ve over to the loca­tion, I found the win­dow smashed and all the elec­tron­ics ripped out. Then a few min­utes before the first shot of the film, a crow dropped a warm shit on my right shoul­der. The rest is history.

Any­way, dream cof­fee is dif­fer­ent than real cof­fee. The cof­fee mak­er was a large open drum, into which TC had poured about two pounds of ara­bi­ca beans along with some nuts and spices. He start­ed the grinder, but then he stopped it again, not quite ready. He grabbed two big apples and put them in the drum as well, and he turned to me with that mil­lion dol­lar smile.

“Yeah?” he said. 

“Well, they might work bet­ter if they were dried,” I said. He did­n’t under­stand what I meant. “There’s a lot of water in apples.”

He took the apples out of the drum and threw them across the counter toward the fruit bowl, but he missed. He tried to act like he was hap­py I saved him from sog­gy beans, but he was pissed.

“David, nice. Of course.”

Some­body came in and said that we had to get going soon, and Tom got all bitchy and pursed of lip. 

“I have to god­damn eat ! I can’t not eat!” he was say­ing as I left the room. 

That was it. It felt great. I felt great. It was a good dream. It prob­a­bly does­n’t have any­thing to do with that Spiel­berg dream, because I am not about to direct or any­thing, but fuck you, it’s my dream, and it means what I need it to mean.