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The whole Trump Madness has infiltrated my dreams. There it was hiding out in my subconscious ready to jump out in the middle of my deep-sleep dreams. Where did I think all those stories of another craziness would go? They are sort of like cat hair — you think you are rid of them but there they are still clinging to the back of your legs where you can’t see them.

That particular night, I had been talking with my sister, Julie. As with most conversations with my siblings, the talk of gardens and grandchildren sank into the incredible sadness and sorrow of Life with Donald. We had each and all promised ourselves that, in our phone conversations, we would not utter a word or phrase or share a thought about him or his crookedness or his greed or his lies or his stupidity or his tweets or his destructiveness of every good thing about the US or even how threatened we all feel because of all of the above. But, inevitably, he still creeps in at the edges of our conversations and before we know it we are beating our breasts in lamentations and curses at our fate.

In that particular conversation, Julie was saying, “We had an earthquake the other night.” Now to me that is a pretty momentous statement and told her so. She continued, “I was in bed. When it woke me up I knew that it had to be an earthquake or an animal in my bed.” I enjoyed her two options. Anyway, that statement led to us talking about fracking in Oklahoma which led to the changes in environmental laws and from there into the gutter where the administrator of the EPA — also from Oklahoma — dwells. It was a depressing note to end our conversation with so we returned to gardening and grandchildren (hers).

I knew I did not want to go to bed with that on my head, so I poured myself another glass of wine and watched the last scene of Dirty Dancing — the original not that one in Cuba — for the forty-fifth time. I quite love it when Patrick Swayze swaggers in wearing his leather jacket and says, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” And then grabs her arm and they do that very sexy dance. When that was over and I was sure I had only stored away in my subconscious my sisters delight over her wonderful garden — it is truly spectacular — and Patrick’s hips and left all that negative junk downstairs for the cats to deal with, I took me and my Maisie Dobbs mystery up to bed for a long summer’s night.

Then, around that bewitching hour of 4 am when all demons are set loose, Trumpy slipped out of my subconscious and into an otherwise perfectly fine dream I was having. Before I knew it, he and his henchman were closing in on a ditch where me and another woman were scooping up piles of money that her no-good husband had hidden under the mattress. I knew something was terribly wrong when the henchman started shooting little puck-size pellets into the air. He told Donald, “This will be an atomic bomb in about five minutes.” I’m sure I would have seen Donald tweet about it if I had stayed asleep, but, thankfully, I woke up and did not ever want to go back to sleep that night.

Maybe I should take that dream with me to my Jungian therapist and get his interpretation. Perhaps it doesn’t have anything to do with Mr. T at all but is really about an ex-lover or even, as Scrooge would have said, just “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.” (None of which I ate that night.) No, I think this is what it is and the message to me is to start becoming more aware of what’s happening around me and not letting fear keep me from doing what I can to counter it. As Scrooge promised to keep Christmas, I’ll promise to counter this negativity with positivity. I’ll try to be kinder and more generous, to laugh more and not to yell at bicyclist on the sidewalks for at least a month. It might not do much to curb the insanity of Washington, but it will make life better for those around me and, perhaps, keep Trump out of my dreams.

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