I woke this morning having dreamed of an acceptance email from a literary journal. The email said that the journal, which didn't have a name, were willing to pay me $70 for a piece I had submitted. The piece was called 'Senseless'. I don't remember if it was poetry or prose but in the dream I knew it was a piece that contained no references to any of the five physical senses.

The email in my dream opened abruptly. No, 'Dear Rob, thank you for sending us your... we are pleased to announce that...' It might even have started with '$70', or at least, that was the part my eye in my dream was drawn to first. I don't know why this was the number my unconscious settled on. I'm disappointed it conjured with dollars, not pounds, but I wasn't going to turn the money down. In the dream, I don't think I had time to respond to the email. I woke and soon remembered that nothing I have submitted for publication has been accepted in months.

Outside, there is a city I have never visited before. Yesterday was minus twelve degrees Celsius, cold enough to freeze the tube of hand cream I left in the car, cold enough to turn my nose hair to wire wool. I am considering whether I should go out tonight to see some live blues music. I have brought my ear plugs with me, just in case. The last gig I wore ear plugs for wasn't even that loud.

In the drive, someone has parked a Chevrolet that looks like it's been salvaged from a succession of wrecks, the great-grandchild of a long line of terrible decisions on the road. On the journey here across the mountains, I saw the remnants of a container lorry shattered and scattered across the central reservation, covered in a gentle layer of snow. The debris looked like it had been there for weeks or even months, too large and messy to clear from the grass once it had been shunted out the way of the traffic, but I could swear one of the headlights was still on, shining confidently through the frost. If so, it meant the bulb was still, somehow, connected to a functioning battery, which seemed impossible. I thought of an eyeball drifting from its socket, attached only by the optic nerve, or other mico-fibric tendrils, the scientific names for which I'll probably never know.

This afternoon, I will uncover more of the dream by thinking about it. Dreams, as we experience them in our waking hours, are predominantly buried things. They come from hidden places and they remain, even when we remember them, hidden. We are given access to scraps only, like stray dogs in a drought. There are so many metaphors to choose from. That one doesn't even really work. We can talk about dreams as if they are the pockets in memory caused by drinking too much, recovered only once you sit through the sickly haze of the morning after, and sometimes you never recover from what you have done, or the memory of it. Perhaps you would like to think of the subconscious as a body of water, restless and opaque. Your dream from last night could be the rotting bloat of something drifting by - a fallen tree, a bundle of soaked clothes bound by packing tape, a plastic bag of something else. All these and more rotate just below the surface so that they sometimes lip the air. You catch only parts of whatever it is as it turns and flows away. It's up to you to guess the form, or what the form contains. You have to decide if you want to spend time and energy chasing such forms, these whisps in the river. Remember, you can't swim.

I saw a shape like that down in the Ohio river yesterday evening. I refused to let the cold stop me from seeing the water. I told myself I could sense the water was there, that I could feel its weight from a distance, without even having to look at a map, but there's no way this could be true and I look at maps all the time. The Ohio was swollen and muddy with old snow. The smoothed bunk of an old tree swindled past, almost black. I couldn't tell what it really was, no matter how hard I watched, and there was only a brief window. The last of the day was purple and orange and translucent in the West, going down through the cyclopean struts of the Clark Memorial Bridge, the edge of Indiana, and the river front was heavy and empty and the most poetic I'd felt all day, though I couldn't feel my fingers or my toes. I had new shoes and new gloves. The gloves had been free. I found them on a bench in a lecture hall, with a handwritten note that said 'Free gloves'. They were clean and seemed to be of good quality. I was happy with them, even though they weren't enough.

Sometimes, when I feel like a failure, I remind myself that no one in the history of the universe has ever seen what anyone else has seen. Every passing moment, as perceived by me, as perceived by anyone, is unlike any that has ever been or ever will be. This is true for every one of us. The uniqueness of our experience is inescapable. We don't even get to choose.

The part of my dream that resurfaced was about a small bowl of cacti. This dream bowl was based on a real bowl of succulents I bought from Target the week I moved to Virginia. Succulents and cacti are not the exact same thing. All cacti are succulents, but not all succulents are cacti. I like the sound of both words, so I will use them interchangeably. There were originally four different species of succulent in the bowl, all of them looking healthy, all of them looking like if you cut them open they would yield some sort of oil, capable of soothing red, broken skin. An organic balm. Perfect for winter. Perfect, also, for the summer. The succulents were green and dark blue and soft enough to stroke, no spines. That was around six months ago. My life was very different then. Only two cacti have survived. Two of them, the softest two, withered away. They turned slimey and brown, like butter in a pan. I think the bowl they were sold in was simply too small to contain all four plants simultaneously. The soil substrate was just too thin, the roots too coiled. The plants had been bunched together to look their best, but it couldn't last.

In the dream, the bowl was completely empty, or at least, that's how it turned out. One moment I looked and the cacti were in full, spiky bloom, pink and red. Then when I looked away, something happened. I remember being angry with someone, or feeling as if I had failed profoundly, like someone at the bottom of the sea. Anger and failure, so often twined, flood-like, feeding off each other's twists and thorns. When I looked back, the bowl was bare. I went looking for someone to blame. Someone had pruned those plants out of the world. Not even stubs remained. Have you ever seen your own neck in a dream? Have you ever seen your feet? I remember getting someone to look more closely at the soil, just to prove a point. The point would have been obvious had it not been a dream. If it had not been a dream, it might have been impossible. The dreamworld isn't real. I don't even know if it's worth spending time there. 'Look at where those plants once were,' I said. 'Look at the soil. It's empty.' I stared as close I could. Seedlings of weeds had sprouted. Green filaments were beginning to tick out of the earth, probing the dreamworld. I took this as evidence that whatever had been there before was no longer there, that something had been taken. A few weeks later, I will write a poem in which the following line appears - 'In time, everything grows over itself, in time' - and I will submit the poem as part of a creative project, to show I have been thoughtful. Weeds are evidence of a vacant space. Weeds are evidence of nothing at all. How wonderful. I don't want to remember any more. I don't want to think about the bundle in the river. Not until the next one comes along, catches my eye.