It's snowing and bells are ringing in the church across from the school...a pack of hunting dogs chasing down a deer and I'll know that the border between this world and the other world has thinned almost to nothing.

Imagine my suprise on opening the New Yorker to discover that someone had written a poem about meeting William Burroughs in a dream, in a farmhouse - exactly what I dreamt a short time after he died. I'll have to write a response. Burroughs himself wrote often of being in the land of the dead, where he would meet with friends and acquaintances who were dead or dying; his trilogy, 'Cities of the Red Night', 'The Place of Dead Roads' and 'The Western Lands' is a great epic of death, partly set in the afterlife. As in a great many dreams, Burroughs 'just knew' that it was the land of the dead, even before he met someone long gone. I saw, as well as Burroughs, my grandfather in that same place some time before he died, with his dog, who died a long time before that. The poet in the New Yorker says that Burroughs told him something - the dead in my dreams never say anything at all.

Considering it's the one absolutely inevitable fact of life, isn't it strange that very, very few people try to write about the moment of death? The only writer I know who ever tried was Beckett in 'Malone Dies' and perhaps also in 'The Unnameable', which might be read as the instant of death stretched out or dilated so that it seems unending. Now that I think about it, there is the Ambrose Bierce short story about a man being hanged - we think he has escaped but it is in fact his final fantasy as he drops. And another by someone whose name I can't remember fading out on a life support machine. So fair enough, there have been a few. But you'd think there would be more.

Anorther strange dream coincidence - one night (when else?), I dreamt that a fire began in a church and quickly spread to the rest of the city. I tried to take shelter in a doorway and the next thing I knew I was standing with my family in front of a lake. Two days later, I got an email from a girl I hadn't (and haven't) seen for years who said "I just dreamt about you - there was a fire but you escaped and you seemed very happy in front of a lake with your family." That's just the kind of thing you don't want to hear, isn't it? Our abiding connection is that we share a birthday - astrologers, do your worst.

I had to abandon Burroughs at a certain point - to say he's unhealthy would be an understatement. But perhaps I've been harsh on him. When I visited him, or when he visited me, he was the very soul of kindness.