I dreamed again I was allowed to marry another semicolon.  Our wedding was conducted by San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren, who kept saying, "I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal ... That semicolon is a big deal."

Later that night, I dreamed that I discussed my marriage with Rick Boyer, who said: "Like punctuation marks, milestones break up, to a degree, the continuity of daily experience.  And like those little black marks, they add dimensions to the text of our lives, extra meaning that otherwise we would fail to read.  Nate's upcoming wedding day, like a speed bump, to some degree sneaked up on us despite the fact that we've been looking forward to it.  What is it about weddings, anyway?  You have one marked on the calendar for perhaps a year or two; yet, two weeks before the event all is madness and pandemonium as both families scramble to get ready. ... Our coming 'big day' reminds me that milestones - those punctuation marks of life - are liberally dispersed for all and that life is not one uninterrupted stream but a book with a beginning and an end.  It has sentences and paragraphs, set apart by punctuation marks, that add up to chapters which sometimes we don't recognize as such until looking back later over the nearly completed manuscript."

My dream was concupiscent.

My dream was cloudy.

I dreamed I was the Berlin Wall, separating the independent clauses of East and West Germany.  But suddenly the clauses joined together.  I woke myself up.

Later that night, I dreamed I had a crush on a man who "speaks like a president, not always authoritative or anything but he can form sentences, complex sentences with beginnings and ends, subordinate clauses--you can HEAR his semicolons!"  Upon waking up, I realized this man was a character in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.  Up to that point, I had always agreed with Roger E. Axtell that "You can't say a comma or a semicolon unless you are Victor Borge."

I dreamed again that I was in hell, forever separating the independent clauses of a compound sentence, as if they were young siblings fighting over space in the back seat of the family station wagon.

Later that night, I dreamed I was caught in traffic.

Upon waking, I was filled with the "immortal longings" that impel "every hyphen and semicolon," as discussed by William Stryon in Sophie's Choice.

I dreamed again about a coordinating conjunction.  It said the clauses in our sentence were long and contained internal punctuation used to separate long items in a series.  This was what I wanted to hear: it meant that I belonged in the sentence.  But for some reason I felt certain that the conjunction was lying.

I also dreamed that I had dinner and drinks with Michael Tomasky, who said: "If I were linguistic emperor, not only would semicolons be mandatory, but we’d all be writing like Carlyle: massive 130-word sentences that were mad concatenations of em dashes, colons, semicolons, parentheticals, asides; reading one of those Carlyle sentences can sweep me along in its mighty wake and make me feel as if I’m on some sort of drug.  What writing today does that?  Some, maybe even a lot, in the realm of literature; but not much in non-fiction, alas.”

I dreamed I was mistaken as an indication that less perfume is required.

I dreamed again I had to make a speech.  When I got to the podium, I realized I wasn't wearing any clothes.

Later that night, I dreamed far into the future, when I had become a giant monument in the town of Dusty, Arizona.  Tourists came from far and wide to show me to their children.

Then I dreamed of Jorge Luis Borges' "predilection for the endless sentence with semicolons as milestones along the route," as noted in Borges: The Selected Fictions.

Reader Comments:

Johnny Rem writes,

Intriguing dream.  I love the concept of the monument... how did it feel being famous yet sculpted in stone?

I dreamed X was a broken question mark.*

*as per Juan Felipe Herrera's Crash Boom Love: A Novel in Verse, 1999

I dreamed I read the great American novel.

I dreamed of sitting on a glistening rock, thinking sadly of someone who had changed and drifted away from me.

I dreamed I had faith in an exclamation point.

I dreamed that two nebulae collided to form a cosmic semicolon, but Big Science held its camera upside down and called it an exclamation mark.

I dreamed a green-faced Gustav Meyrink confessed to me: "I want to be a full-stop rather than eternally a comma in the punctuation of time." 

I dreamed my tea leaf reader saw an asterisk.*

*To learn what an asterisk means in a tea leaf reading, see Dr. Boli.

I dreamed that a misplaced question mark obfuscated the entire meaning of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

(My typographical error dream was no doubt triggered by Fredericka Beardsley Gilchrist's The True Story of Hamlet and Ophelia.)

(Thanks, FutilityCloset.)

---

June asks:

I dreamed of a self-possessed apostrophe—a ghost haunting itself.

(Inspired by Gary Barwin.)

I dreamed I had two left feet.

[In Anton Chekhov's "The Exclamation Mark," visions of punctuation dance before a civil servant's eyes.  Which punctuation leads the dance and which follows?  This much is certain: the semicolon is left-footed.  Gautam Malkani confirms: "Punctuation came with a kick, but with his left foot this time so it was more like a semicolon" (Londonstani, 2006, p. 3).]