[This is a dream.]

I heard the email alert go 'ping' and groped for my phone pillowside.
And saw blearily I'd received an email from S offering me a newly-printed chapbook of his poems for $15 but he'll take cash 'in any currency'.
To which I indignantly retorted how about Australian dollars and I thought he was setting stories not poems and don't I automatically get a complimentary (and signed!) copy anyway?
(And because even by irked dream logic I had a fair inkling some of the female characters might be based on me...)
Then I squinted harder and the email was actually from the poet Charles Wright saying he'd seen me quote and discuss a line from one of his poems on the Internet
And saying kindly that my English is not bad (and it's hard when you're new to learning a language, isn't it)
And offering to sell me the volume of his poems in which the line quoted appeared, at $15 but cash in any equivalent currency.
The part of me not sputtering about the aspersions cast on my English (for have not US immigration officers said that to me for 15 years?) was baffled as to when exactly direct mail-order poetry had become a Thing
And I woke up thinking hey but that line was Richard Wilbur for goodness sake.

Which, as I said to S afterwards, was as sure an example of the dreaming mind incorporating recent elements into sleep pictures. Not, of course, that I'd ever taken any classes with Charles Wright when I was at UVA; though it's easy to see how my mind made an associative leap (Wilbur + Wright.) And I had in fact been talking to S about assorted typefaces and page-making software before going to bed, agreeing it was hard getting to grips with unfamiliar software for the first time.

Even I was astonished later, however, when I looked up the Richard Wilbur poem in full ('...doubtless it is dangerous to love / This somersault of seasons; / But I am weary of / The winter way of loving things for reasons.') Clearly I had completely put it out of my conscious memory, but there was the typesetting connection in fact: The word 'serifs' appears in it. (He was talking about ice on trees in winter, 'laden serifs' on 'a script of trees'.)

*Also wishing I remember what Tony Spearing says about dream visions; all I can unfortunately remember is James Simpson on cheese dreams not being prophetic dreams.