A dream

Thrust unwillingly onstage with a fellow, but received by way of encouragement a copy of this fellow's latest book, title beginning with Z, which I was pleased to have. We sat at a table and chatted with each other, unmiked, waiting for whatever was supposed to happen next. A referee of some kind asked the fellow for his question. He said, addressing the audience and the ref, "page 76." Then I was asked for my question. I had detemined in this short space that my "question" was to be an answer to a question, unstated, about the fellow's poetry. (So p. 76 was the answer to his unstated question about my work--but I did half-realize that my book was not that long.) "I've run out of alphabet," was the answer I gave. But the judge was displeased. I spent several minutes waiting for the rightness of my unstated question's answer to seem correct to her and the audience, but said nothing further. I felt a funny tension, anxiety, between being sure that what I'd ventured was not only OK under the rules (as I'd suddenly intuited them) but interesting, and the fact that nobody seemed willing to recognize it as such. Alternately I wondered which of us is the fool? Then I woke up.