Remind me never to read Rilke before bed. I dreamt of San Francisco, not the city of today, but as it was in the sixties (which is funny because the closest I've been to San Francisco in the sixties was reading Tripmaster Monkey; I was born in 1976). I somehow walked from the corner of Ashbury and Haight through the Castro (which was stubbornly the Castro of today; I hate anachronisms) to end up in Golden Gate Park. Somewhere along the line I took a trolley. I had a journal and was obsessed with aptly describing the color of the sky (it was sort of a mauve). Once I got to the park, I met a ballerina who was standing en pointe. We had a long conversation, most of which I do not remember except she told me, "Nobody loves a genius child".
For some reason, the line from the Langston Hughes poem frightened me, and turn and ran. I ended up on a sidewalk overlooking a cliff. There was a long-haired man who was spraypainting something in Latin (I don't remember what) on the cement. He looked up at me, smiled a toothless smile and vomited on the pavement. I woke up, realized I'd only been asleep for two hours, scribbled down some details of the dream in my journal, then went back to sleep.