It was in the form of a verismo opera without music:

A woman in her early 20s named Ilse Schobart, who had briefly dated Bobby Kennedy (the good one, not Jr.), was playing her guitar and singing in a hotel I now see inspired by the Chelsea with her boyfriend in the room.

In the next scene, they’re hanging out with a black couple who appear nowhere else in the dream.

Her boyfriend drops her off at the hotel and goes home. A man approaches her and somehow she invites him into her hotel room to listen to her music Once they’re in, he rapes and murders her.

I guess he gets away with it because the last frame takes place decades later, with him as an old man Ilse comes back as a revenant and rips his throat open with her sharp teeth. Then she falls dead over his body. The curtain falls.

This is remarkable for a few reasons. First, I almost never remember my dreams, and when I do, it’s only a couple scenes that make no sense by daylight; this is four complete, coherent tableaux. Second, the name is a real one, though I’ve never known any Germans. Schobart was a minor Baroque composer that out of thousands of recordings I’ve owned, I’ve only had one piece on an LP of deep organ cuts I’ve listened to only once in my life and no longer own. Third, I have no mind for fiction and very rarely read it (and have never written it), yet here my brain is spinning a whole ghost story (although horror is the only fiction I do read). Fourth, the same backyard the rapist is killed in has appeared in other dreams, though I’ve never been there in my life.

I’m not superstitious but this dream is so odd that I wonder if there’s a meaning to it. It’s not a guilty conscience because I’ve never raped or murdered anyone. My brain must be telling me something, I just have no clue what.

Anyway, this dream was so uniquely odd and vivid that I had to share it. That’s all.