Dreaming of Bob Dylan

The other night I dreamed I was young, carrying my poetry in my hands. I did not know my destination, and neither the time nor the place were familiar. As I walked past the little shops and homes on the street in that unknown world, a young man appeared and reappeared, cheshire-like and smiling. He kept tugging on the poems, teasing me to hand my poetry to him. He was charming but I resisted. He looked nothing like Robert Zimmerman, and he was not Bob Dylan yet (or any more), but I knew who he was.

Last night I dreamed of Bob Dylan in present times. He arrived on a bus and was already across the way when I waved my camera at him. He paused for a picture but my camera failed and he did not wait.

According to Wikipedia: Joni Mitchell described Dylan as a "plagiarist" and a "fake" in a 2010 interview in the Los Angeles Times. The woman who sang "we've got to get back to the garden" must have lost her sense of humor. Bad form, Roberta Joan Anderson.

Also according to Wikipedia: "Because Dylan was widely credited with imbuing pop culture with a new seriousness, the critic Nik Cohn objected: "I can't take the vision of Dylan as seer, as teenage messiah, as everything else he's been worshipped as. The way I see him, he's a minor talent with a major gift for self-hype."

A minor talent could not sell his music for five decades and counting. More than three thousand musical artists would not want to record a minor talent's songs. Who spells his name "Nik", anyway? That is what school girls do - experiment with different spellings until one seems just right to write in glitter on their notebooks.

I do not know why I would dream of Bob Dylan. Perhaps he is my muse - a gravel voiced, hard minded, old dude - a long way opposite of handsome. His poetry is not even beautiful to me, but I get it. I genuinely get it and love it. No matter what, Dylan continues doing what was in his heart to do, and it has always turned out well for him. Doing what is in our hearts to do turns out well for everyone.