DAY

I explore a bookshop (which shall remain nameless) on Potrero Hill (which won't). A small but impressive collection, sharing my tastes. I enthuse about a book they lack, but fits this collection--Kathy Malkasian's Eartha. The bookseller looks it up and says "it's already out of print"--she can't order it new, so she can't make money on it. She doesn't bother to hide that she finds my geeky enthusiasm over books just to read to be wasting her time--how immature. She's not just bored; scornful.

And I? I feel ashamed, as if I committed a social gaffe. Yet all I did was share a title I like with a someone in the book trade who I thought might love it too. At Borderlands (my favorite local bookstore) such an act elicits, from every single staffer, similar enthusiastic comparisons and recommendations. But here, I'm an annoying bore.

DREAM

I'm in bed with a girl I'm attracted to; our first time. Earnestly lick her nipples but they don't harden a bit; this just doesn't excite her.

After a while I realize with a shock I'm no longer on her nipple but licking her clit... and even that leaves her totally bored. Looks at me like I'm an idiot to think that's a sexy spot! Don't I know anything?

I'm shaken to have no sense at all of what she likes--if anything! It's a sixth sense I've taken for granted all my life. Up til now. Now I'm reduced to five senses, to guessing without feedback or encouragement.

And that's a nightmare.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Sixth sense: All my life I've sensed a sort of aura around people & animals, showing me their moods, interests and current focus/attention. In some creatures and situations that field gets hard to interpret, but it's always there. It's not sight, hearing, touch, scent or taste, so I have to call it a sixth sense. In the dream I felt blinded. (Not for the first time: see Auraless). Defining this sixth sense isn't vital to understanding the dream; just know that this lifelong sense's sudden failure felt terrible; like a nightmare of going blind.
• Just no pleasing this lover: in that bookshop! She was a book seller, but not a book lover. I am. "And never the twain shall meet."
• ACTION: Quit feeling I was the rude one! Just shop at Borderlands, where they love books and don't sneer at readers. (If I can't get a book locally, I try Powells.com and Biblio.com. I boycott Amazon.)

This isn't a Freudian sex dream (nonsexual things symbolize sex), but the exact opposite, a Faraday sex dream--50 years ago, in Dream Power and The Dream Game, Ann Faraday first pointed out dreams can use sex (which we instinctively understand) to symbolize less tangible nonsexual issues. If you have a baffling sex dream, chuck out Freud and consider Faraday's theory--maybe it's not about sex at all.

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