Neil Diamond by Iris gerh, via Wikimedia Commons
Last night, I dreamed that Neil Diamond took my husband and me to a concert. Why Neil Diamond? Who knows. He was popular during my childhood and adolescence but was never one of my faves.
For whatever reason, that’s who my subconscious picked last night. We arrived at the venue for the concert, and it was like no place a concert has ever been held before: a maze of wholly unsuitable rooms. There were rooms like cavernous church basements filled with folding chairs. There were rooms like diners with narrow booths and tables in the open spaces. There was a storage room filled with boxes. And all these rooms were laid out in this twisting, turning floor plan like the palace in the Poe story “The Masque of the Red Death.”
Concertgoers were everywhere. The place was absolutely packed, and shortly after we went inside and began to snake our way through the crowd to find our seats, we lost Neil Diamond. He scooted on ahead, able to walk more quickly because we were carrying coolers and stuff, and he wasn’t. And he was the only one of us who knew where we were supposed to sit.
I wanted to wait at the place where we’d lost him to see if he’d come back for us, but my husband was certain we could catch up, so we set out to find him. We walked through a room where people had been pushed back from the center and were seated behind ropes as if waiting for a parade. We saw a local musician we know sitting there, and I wanted to stop and ask if he and his wife had seen Neil Diamond go by, but my husband was hurrying on. We passed through one room with a whole mass of uninstalled toilets lined up in rows. Then we went through one of the diner-like rooms, and I had to crawl over people sitting in a booth to keep up.
We never did find Neil Diamond or our seats. But just as I woke up, I realized it didn’t matter. We were already inside the concert venue. We had arrived. Maybe we didn’t know our place yet, but we would find it.
And that, my friends, is what I think the dream was telling me. You see, Monday I sent the PDF proofs of my novel back to the publisher, and yesterday, I received an email telling me that the next and final set of proofs is already on its way back to me. My book is going to be for sale soon, probably in less than a month. Instead of feeling excited and happy, I’ve been nervous. What if no one hears of it? What if no one buys it? What if those who buy it hate it?
In other words, I have my ticket and I’ve been admitted into the arena of published novelists. I have arrived, but I still don’t know what my place will be. But maybe that doesn’t matter. At least I can always say (metaphorically) that I went to a concert with Neil Diamond.
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Ruth Hull Chatlien 