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You know, I had this dream about Harlan Ellison , a few years back, and I've made some
threatening noises about posting it online, from time to time, but demurred because it was
downright maudlin. Even now that some folks around Harlan Ellison’s Art Deco Dining
Pavillion have recently reported Harlan dreams of their own, I was still gonna
refrain...again, because it's so maudlin it's downright embarrassing. Men who wish to
keep their dignity don't do such things.
But, you know what? A good guy, who I knew not well but enough to like and admire
and look forward to seeing, just dropped dead without warning, while still a relatively
young man, and everybody's eulogizing him, and I find myself moved past the tradition
of words spoken about the dead. I would have preferred to compliment him more audibly
while he was alive. So to hell with maudlin. The target of these sentiments IS alive. So
I'm gonna share the dream I had, and screw the embarrassment. I'll regain my dignity
another time.
The setting was an important professional writer's gathering of some kind, possibly the
Nebulas (as per the usual logic of dreams, it was sometimes the Nebulas, sometimes not),
held at a hotel that seemed to have been designed by a madman. I say this because there
was no easy way to enter the building. There was a doorway to the banquet hall where the
event was being held, but it was ten feet off the ground, with so stairs or elevator, and the
edifice below that threshold was a smooth marble surface, so friction-free that even Peter
Parker might have had trouble climbing it. In real life we would have said, to hell with it,
and written a nasty letter to the event planners. But there was a whole bunch of us
gathered below that opening, jumping up and down in the vain hopes of hooking our
fingertips on the sill...and not managing any purchase, as the amplified sounds of the
banquet filtered down to us.
For reasons unstated in the dream, which went on for quite some time, it was a given that
attendance at this particular banquet was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. We HAD to get
there.Our CAREERS were up there.
I know several of the faces who shared that hapless gathering with me. They were all of
my generation, or the generation after. But we were all trapped down there, on the
ground. We tried building human pyramids. Collapse! We tried to construct stairways out
of nearby debris. Collapse! No success. All while the sounds of the banquet continued to
torment us.
Then a familiar voice among us, in tones of aggravation known to any who encounter
him in the conscious world, said, "Jeez, Castro, do I have to do everything for you
people?"
I had this dream following his heart attack, and I recall him complaining at length about
the weight he had to shoulder, while Susan geshried about the strain. (Her accent, here,
was Jewish and not British. Brits complain, but they never geshrei.)
But all of us eventually reached that ledge, standing on Harlan Ellison's shoulders.
March 28 2007
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