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[Editor's Note: Dan Kennedy is the author of "Exactly Like Liz Phair, Except Older. And with Hypochondria ," which appears in Love Is a Four-Letter Word]

This ex-girlfriend of mine was at this book reading I was doing downtown, and out of nowhere this baby walks up; totally surprises us. The tiny infant looked exactly like one of The Supremes in their 60's heyday on Motown Records; maybe six-months old, but it had huge adult-sized teeth. And this baby liked me way too much; crawled fast and robotically up onto the table I was sitting behind, her head swaying to some sweet jam she was belting out, teeth the size of her own hand glistening in a disturbing confident smile. The ex-girlfriend, she's taken to attending my readings, and each night when she approaches me to have her book signed, something odd like this happens. And then she suggests we leave the bookstore together and go watch the Disney film Bed Knobs and Broomsticks. The catch, she says, is that if I accept the invitation, I will die. I am tempted because I love this movie, and determined to figure out a way around the death part, but in the end I decide against it; I decide I would rather live.

About three minutes ago, I rocketed awake from this little nocturnal psychotic tapestry of deranged haunting with a series of hyper ventilated twists and turns, and now I'm wide awake in the living room, typing this. In my headphones, a song called "The Last of The International Playboys" by Morrissey is blasting, and down the hall my girlfriend is sleeping peacefully in our bed. Sleep is widely rumored to rejuvenate people, but what they don't tell you is that it can also tax and drain you in a so-called dreamscape of ex-girlfriends exacting revenge and soul-singing toddlers sent to remind the dreamer that they're aging in an extended adolescence, having evidently forgotten to deliver on the biological imperative to reproduce.

If you could have seen me last night before I went to sleep and had this dream, you would have thought I looked like a well-adjusted adult who has love and adulthood and the rest of it all figured out. My girlfriend and I were here on this very couch, watching a very mainstream comedy - the Harold Ramis film Analyze This appropriately enough - laughing, pausing the movie occasionally to trade small stories from our week. When I was in my early twenties I had the drive and curiosity to wake up each morning trying to figure out the dreams I'd had while I was sleeping. Back then, I'd sit around isolated northern California agricultural towns with fellow transient community college creative types trying to crack the code. What were these messages sent to us in slumber after we had passed out on various local girls' futon couches? But a decade or two goes by without any hard quantifiable benefit of trying to figure any of them out, and I lose interest in the whole idea of solving the puzzle. I mean, it's not like I've ever awakened in a panic like this the suddenly gone: "Ah ha! The answers I was looking for about love, death, and success came to me last night, encoded as poetic cipher in a series of random disturbing vignettes! These days I find myself talking with my girlfriend about anything but the dream I had - as you get older you do yourself and the ones you love all kinds of favors like this. Books, jokes, the neighbors, the weather - all of these have become more attractive topics of morning conversation.  These days on the off chance I mention a dream I had and she asks,  "What do you think it means?" I'm prone to take it all at face value and get on with the day. "It means I've been wondering if some girl I dated ten years ago wants to kill me in a movie theater. And that babies with adult teeth who can do good cover versions of Supremes songs love my work." I usually follow this up with,  "Hey, let's get out of here and go get some breakfast. You wanna?"