Can Having Colored Dreams be a Habit/

I’ve taken to reading Montesqiueu on the toilet, his Persian Letters, of late. This is a new habit. My ages old habits include biting my nails, reading, scribbling dubiously, lying effusively, and soccer. I was watching some of the latter (soccer sucker that I am) this afternoon: the Colombian national side against the powerhouse, smooth-oiled, Bleu French machine. The Colombians were taking such a drubbing that I had seemingly no choice but to lay into a long nap.I had green dreams; another new habit. Can having colored dreams be a habit? This I don’t know. I figured it was because of that expanse of white-lined green turf, and those streaks of bleu and yellow uniforms blending into a hectic habit of sport in that French stadium that caused the green dream. I’d had a citrus acid red dream the previous weekend involving a pink Greyhound, Latin American history, and a large pitcher of red ale; and even the least literary understand it when I tell of having had a night of bleak black dreams.When I woke from my green nap I scrambled to work on a pair of stories—not this story—but those two others that I’ll soon be getting graded on. I’ve got a two-day deadline. They grate on me, deadlines, and that is perhaps their greatest quality. Without the flesh they rend from my back I am but a naked, one-pound block of sharp cheddar cheese; but when those deadlines threaten, I transfigure my habitual smoke and my habitual mirrors into something satisfactory.

Like a Quesadilla, or The Saddest Factory

I’m squeezing something satisfactory out of a long nap and a lousy soccer match and an Ouza with coffee at the corner pub where I’ve gone to find some salty peace. The other stories, those suffering from deadline syndrome, are coming along. Neither is too ambitious, that much can be said for them at the least. One of the stories is about a sad story and the other also, but unintelligibly. I wouldn’t be surprised to wake up tomorrow to take in the anguished flight of a brother colored dream; the color of the backyard mass of grass mulch that a recent great friend of mine was jumping up and down on in the gravender light of a cold, cloudy early June Oregon evening. I would not be surprised that he’d have been telling me about a recent lucid dream of his in which his ailing grandmother and Heaven and heaving sighs all played starring roles. I would hope that a dream like this would convince me unequivocally of the habitual potential of colored dreams.