Last night, I had a dream in which my ex-girlfriend Pamela sent me an escalating series of outrageous requests. In her first email, the subject of which was REQUEST, Pamela informed me that she was applying to study alternative medicine, so would I please write a letter of recommendation for her. I replied that really she should be requesting letters from her former professors. Pamela responded that she needed three letters, and that I was a professor. “But not YOUR professor. Plus, I’m an English professor. I teach poetry,” I said, which, of course, Pamela knows. “I know nothing about alternative medicine,” I also said, but Pamela cheerily brushed that aside, saying that she also knew nothing, hence, her plan to go to graduate school.
Even in my dream, this all seemed ludicrous, but I nonetheless opened a doc to draft a letter of rec, wondering what I could possibly say, when another email arrived from Pamela, subject OH ALSO! In this email, Pamela informed me that she had a book forthcoming, and would like me to write a blurb. “You wrote a book??” I replied—my dream specifically inserted that second incredulous and obnoxious question mark. Yes, Pamela responded, a book about circus sideshows. Again, I felt compelled to reply that I was not the ideal blurber for such a book. I knew even less about circus sideshows than I did about alternative medicine. Again, Pamela blithely brushed off my reservations as irrelevant, promised to send me the PDF of her circus book pronto, and signed off with a thank you emoji.
As I sat grumpily at my dream desk, a third email came from Pamela, with her manuscript attached, subject ONE LAST THING. Pamela explained that she had recently gotten a DUI, which she was attempting to have expunged from her record. Her lawyer had asked her to get a letter from a character witness attesting that she was a responsible, decent person, and the DUI was an anomaly. “Why me?” I responded, and Pamela explained that her lawyer had specified that her character witness should be either a professor, a social worker, or a clergyperson. Well, that made me laugh, the idea that a professor was a morally upstanding person. A social worker or a clergyperson made more sense. I wondered why Pamela hadn’t asked her ex-girlfriend Naomi, who was a rabbi, and both professionally and actually a morally upstanding person. But I didn’t even pose the question “Why don’t you ask Naomi?” because the answer was obvious: Naomi resents Pamela even more than I do.
By this point in the dream, I was fuming. I clicked the link for the letter of recommendation, and began filling out the program’s grid. In every category, I gave Pamela the lowest possible score. She did not collaborate well with others, she was not ethical, she was not disciplined, she did not show any research potential. Click, click, click, click. When the form asked me to describe our relationship, I clicked “Other” and typed ex-lover. When it asked me what 5 adjectives best described Pamela, I chose vindictive, shallow, arrogant, callous, and entitled. I noticed that Pamela had not clicked the box guaranteeing that my letter would be confidential and forgoing the right to read it herself, but I did not care. Let her see what I truly think of her! Fuck her! I clicked DO NOT RECOMMEND and submitted my excoriating letter.
At that point I woke up, so abruptly—sitting straight up in bed as if pulled by marionette strings—that Joan, lying beside me, woke up too and said “You okay, babe?”
I went to the kitchen to make myself coffee, in a bit of a state: I felt angry at Pamela for being so outrageous and violating of my boundaries. I felt pleased with myself for writing a harsh yet accurate letter vilifying her, but also a little guilty. I considered why I’d had this particular dream. Why now? Freud maintains that one “leg” of every dream is grounded in some circumstance that happened the prior day. I cast my mind over the prior day, trying to retrieve anything pertaining to Pamela, but the only thing I could recall that seemed evocative was that woman wearing the pink suede jacket. I spotted her when Joan and I were on a walk. When I turned my head to look back at her, Joan said, teasingly, “What are you looking at?” The woman looked nothing like Pamela. She wasn’t attractive; her face was long and equine. Yet something about her—the pink jacket, and her confident, brazen expression, which broadcast that despite what I might think, she understood herself to be attractive—was reminiscent of Pamela.
As I was stirring sugar into my coffee (I do not normally take sugar, but this morning I felt sugar might fortify me) it occurred to me that my dream could be prescient, even clairvoyant. Perhaps my dream was a sign that Pamela was about to intrude upon my life, and her outrageous and nonsensical requests were a sign that Pamela was about to propose something equally outrageous, like that we should get back together. Now, I know full well that Pamela is unworthy of me, that Pamela is all the awful things I said about her, that Joan is a much kinder and more mature person, the choice of beloved a kind and mature person would make. Joan is similar in fact to Naomi the rabbi. Nonetheless, I must confess that my theory filled me with undeniable joy.
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Kim Magowan is the author of the short story collection Don’t Take This the Wrong Way (2025), co-authored with Michelle Ross, published by EastOver Press; the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Colorado Review, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com