I had a brand new kind of nightmare last night, akin to waitress stress dreams of five tables seated at once, or surprise final exams.

In the dream, I was reading one of my recently published entries.  The writing began with a few too many of the usual typo devices.  But by the middle of the first paragraph, it had deteriorated to misspellings, and unacceptable, sloppy errors that got worse, withering away from readability.  Gaps in the words, letters gone like missing teeth, word segments that loosened as the sentences wore on, and floated apart on the scrolling screen to become individual letters printed alone, and far apart, like punches on a card.  A little farther downscreen revealed them hanging against gravity, the seraphs and the tails of ‘y’ and ‘j’ waving in wrong directions, letters fallen off the writing grid, dots and lines tipped and scattered toward the bottom of the page, a toss of runes that wiggled into shapes that auroras make, and slid under the footer banner like oil.

here and speak and hear and now

nothing stays the change