About five o'clock on the morning of January 18th, 2002, I was startled awake from such a vivid dream that I knew I needed to write something down immediately before it evanesced. I awoke so suddenly that I inadvertently woke Ivaan. I muttered "pencil". He actually kept a pencil and paper beside the bed because he dreaded forgetting his dreams, so he handed them to me.
Even after writing down what I needed to, I felt far too unsettled to fall asleep again. I felt I'd had a presentiment of his death.
Ivaan had suffered his first stroke in 2000, and two heart attacks in the early 1990s, so I was hyper-vigilant about his wellbeing. The dream from which I'd awoken that night offered no particular clues, but I still remember it with astonishing clarity. I dreamed we were at the Davenport Road home of our friends Danny and Madeleine, and there were quite a number of other guests there as well. In my dream, there was a glass transom above the archway between their living room and dining room, and beside the archway was a ladder. I climbed the ladder and wrote on the glass with my finger:
I turn and study faces in the places you have been
To see if any traces of you yet remain therein.
You left on me your fingerprint, imprimatur and sign.
I wonder if you touched their life as much as you touched mine.
This is when I was startled awake, and knew I had to write it down. I also noted the date and time, and the title You-Logy came to me, although I hadn't written a title on the transom in my dream.
When we eventually woke up, I told Ivaan about the dream and read him what I had written. We were both so unnerved that he asked me to rewrite it in a special book I kept for important notes.
Rereading it now, I still feel there was something prophetic about it. Ivaan's second stroke occurred later that year, in the early hours of the morning. Again, I was startled awake, in that same room, in that same bed, by the realization that Ivaan was in distress, and things were never the same again.
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