The first time I watched and listened to "Dreamin' of You" a subtext immediately crawled under my skin as easily as Harry Dean Stanton did the first time I saw him in a movie decades ago. I do not know if this subtext is Bob Dylan's or the director's or anyone else's. All I know is that I felt it.

It felt just like what happened to me earlier that same day, when an old woman floated out of my dream and haunted me as I woke up in my bed. I watched "Dreamin' of You" later that day for the first time and I instantly thought I knew who it was that Bob Dylan was really dreaming of: himself.

Subtexts are all around us. Some subtexts are imagined by the observer, and some are created by the creator of the thing observed. Some subtexts are intentional, some unintentional, some intentionally avoided, some are subconsciously created, and others come out when you thought you were unconscious, like the subtext of a dream.

An old friend of mine was creating a movie in my dream. He was working with an infamous film director known for about forty years in real life for his numerous controversial films. My friend wanted me to play the part of a teenage girl's mother, and I thought in my dream, "I'm too old to have children now, and I will not play the part of a mother in this weird twisted movie!"

In my dream I was confused to the point of discomfort because somewhere inside me was an old woman who never had children and who wondered what life would have been like if she had settled down and had children, while I felt fulfilled by my life and wanted to keep doing what I've always done and keep doing it better, different maybe, but better right up until the last moment and then I would know that I had done exactly what I was meant to do. But the old woman wouldn't leave me alone. It was a relief to wake up.

I woke up haunted by the old woman from my dream. I got out of bed. I looked in the mirror. I did not see her. I put my hands to my face. I did not feel her. I felt her presence behind me but when I turned she was not there. After awhile she seemed to retreat. But she didn't go far. It was as if she crawled into the space between the walls and the brick of my house and followed me around, peering out through tiny openings in the seams of the corners where the paint is cracked.

Until I had this dream I did not know this old woman existed. She is a subtext. Maybe others see her and I cannot. Maybe some people see her and others do not. Maybe I'll see her again in my dreams. Maybe she exists in some future place and waits for me. Maybe she travels alone along the back mountain roads I used to drive long ago. Maybe she will be traveling with me now like a ghost. She travels light because all she really has to carry are the memories of things I never did.

While the old woman follows me around the house all day I can't stop thinking about the special young woman of twenty-three who disappears for months and then sends me messages promising to call soon. When I look deep in her eyes I see the daughter I never had and I wish to hell she would stop acting like I'm her mother, and I wish she would stop feeling like she has to report to me, stop waiting for the right time to give the report.

I don't know how to get through to her that I don't want or need a report and yet I must be doing something to make her feel that way. With the patience of a true friend I have told her that I will always be here for her, but I cannot stop wondering how she really is.

This young woman is highly intelligent, is beautiful and strong, and was determined years before she met me not to have children because that is not what she wants to spend her life doing she says. I have become another kind of mother to a member of a new generation of women who feel life holds more for them if they are not mothers. Only a woman without her own children could be this kind of mother.

I have lost count of how many young women, and young men, I have met who are committed to not having children. At first I thought it was a passing trend, now I think it is something bigger, a new minority.

These young people are overwhelmed by a world that seems out of control of itself. They feel powerless against the noise that drowns out their voices. They have friends who are dead because these friends joined the army. It is as if life is just survival, as if they are getting ready for the big fall of everything. "…You've thrown the worst fear, that can ever be hurled, fear to bring children, into the world…" They are the living subtext of perhaps the strongest subtext in Bob Dylan's "Masters of War."

These particular young people are the subtext of a future I won't live to see. They gather with their friends in sparse apartments and look deep into the way things are. They have ideas. They look for their place in the world. Maybe we will need more childfree women and men who will have the energy and time to pick up broken pieces of the world and try to put it back together.

The old woman has no response to that. I leave her to her own musings in the wall.

I close my eyes and just listen to Bob Dylan's "Dreamin' of You." I'm floating on a long slow vibration, like a molecule on the string of a guitar. I'm just a pulse riding in a large luxury sedan at seventy miles an hour on a highway heading straight into the horizon. I'm on cruise control. I feel the hot sun on my face, but my body is cool. I'm half asleep, but I'm wide awake in the center of my mind.

"Any minute now, I'm expecting to wake up from a dream." There it is again, this waiting for something to happen, like the feeling I get from "Nettie Moore." "Dreamin' of You" floats me through whatever time I have left, I have no real control over it, the waiting.

It feels like whatever is keeping him in this dream that he can't wake up from is so inescapable the only possibility of waking up from it is to write this song. When I listen to it I get sucked into my own haunting dreams. "The shadowy past is awake and so vast." If Bob Dylan wants company with this one he's already got it. If his work didn't mean so much to me, I'd tell him to get out of my head.

This song exposes more subtexts every time I listen to it and it's an uneasy ride. I'm uncomfortable, like in my dream. But it feels so good. It's always good when someone lets you know it's really all right.

When I turn off the sound and watch the video of "Dreamin' of You" I see an old man driven by something much bigger than his old truck to drive relentlessly from city to city, focused on his one and only task. He works in secret. He hides in the shadow of the musician in the posters. "Bootlegger." What does that really mean?

Whatever it means, he's been doing it for decades. He doesn't even want any more coffee. He's had enough. He holds an old crumpled photograph of a beautiful woman and closes his eyes. He keeps on going. She's been long gone and it's no wonder, a guy like that, who just keeps on going. His life is defined by the music, the posters, the tapes, and the road. He looks so lonely I want to stop him.

But if I were to ever really see that old man with his beat up suitcase and his maps and tour calendars in a roadside diner, I won't stop him. That would be so wrong. I'll go up to him and sit down across the table from him. I'll lean in close and I'll tell him it's all right, it's all OK, every last beautiful grueling minute of it.