I drifted up out of sleep this morning still in the middle of a dream. In the dream, I was talking with this woman Sue, a jazz pianist and piano teacher whom I knew a dozen years ago from the church where I was then working.

Nothing really happened in the dream (I think Sue was telling me about ninth chords, which was the sort of conversation we had in real life). Her boyfriend was in the background somewhere, except I think they were married. It was some kind of social event, because there were other people there too.

Even though nothing happened in the dream, it kept reappearing in my consciousness all day long. Every time it popped up, I wondered why. I drove up to Newton for a meeting, and during the hour-long drive I realized that the last time I had spoken to Sue was when I was living in Newton, and she called to say hi — this was in the late spring of 1999 — and before we hung up she told me, “Hey, don’t be a stranger,” but I never called her back. Was the dream about me feeling guilty about not calling back someone who was a peripheral friend? That seemed unlikely.

I went to the meeting, and as we were all heading off one of the people at the meeting, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time, asked about my mother, and I said that she had died nine or ten years ago. Then as I was getting my car I remembered why I never bothered to call Sue back — because in the summer of 1999, my mother was not doing well, and then she died that fall. And then I remembered that my mother died nine years ago yesterday, and I had completely forgotten that fact all day. Except that I hadn’t really forgotten, because that’s what the dream was doing, it was telling me that I really had remembered, and that’s why I had been so distracted all day long. This may sound nonsensical, but the human soul is not governed by linear logic.