Saturday morning I dreamed about ordinary events that had a strange twist:
For in it Martha and I were taking a Greyhound bus trip somewhere; and at one stop everyone disembarked, since it would be a while before the bus went on. We two had time enough, oddly, to attend a little auction, where I hesitated bidding on a tray holding brass items: for I was thinking about having to pack them in my luggage.
The stop itself seemed a hotel lobby. Soon we learned the bus would be going on only the next day, and that we needed to stay the night at the hotel — on the top story, for some reason. Then it turned out that the bus was going on, after all.
Once we were moving again, I noticed that the first leg's driver was sitting in the rearmost seat.
After a time I realized he was Donald Trump.
A young female passenger apparently also noticed, for she approached him and with well-modulated, self-possessed voice stated her admiration, which she may have meant to express her desire to become his lover. This, at least, was the meaning he took: for he stated his surprise that she thought they could manage it, with nowhere to have privacy. Yet he plainly accepted the situation as a normal one.
The bus had changed, though, as dream-buses will — so that it had a door in the back, which led somehow into an office. This he opened. As he went through, despite his just-earlier receptiveness to the woman's approaches, he said, to whomever was in the office, something dismissive and demeaning about her. In this way he departed, and the dream ended.
It has struck me, when the dream has come back to mind, that the hotel in the dream should be a tall one — and that we most commonplace sorts who might be riding a Greyhound should have the prospect waved before our eyes of staying on the top floor. We ended up having no such stay, of course.
On Greyhound trips, years ago, I sometimes would see off-duty drivers riding along. They always sat in the first seat, so as to gab throughout the trip with the one actually driving. They never would take a seat farther back, let alone the one farthest back.
A certain sort of passenger would choose the rearmost seat, on some trips I took — sometimes of the brown-bag-illicit-beverage sort.
Most of us took one of those seats only as a last resort, on the most jam-packed legs of our journeys.
Cheers ....
