Tonight is the first full moon of 2023, the Wolf Moon for those of you who live where wolves are a protected species and spend their time howling outside your windows, or the Ice Moon for those of you who live in pre-Christian Europe (and Happy Holiday to you). The night of the Full Moon has been targeted as a time where particularly horrible events are more likely to occur. Those who have studied crime and other statistics say that this is fake news. But I say: what do they know?

I personally have never been bothered by a full moon – but the night prior to the full moon has always been a challenge for me. It is on that night that I am most likely to have a difficult time sleeping. This is true whether or not, upon going to bed, I know that it is Erev Full Moon.

Last night, I was determined to win my battle on the Eve of the Full Moon. And indeed I fell asleep rather quickly and assumed (or at least I assume that I assumed since I was asleep – duh) that I was the victor. But something happened at about 3:30 a.m. I heard a loud sound, or was it a scream and woke up abruptly. I quickly saw that everything was all right, and told myself to go back to sleep.

It wasn’t going to happen. As far as I know, I was up from 3:30 on.

Now, I did do some dreaming last night and, to be honest, I don’t know if my dreaming was done before or after 3:30. Either way, I think that the dreams were influenced by the Wolf Moon.

Edie and I were going to an outdoor concert to see a singer that we both liked. The singer was an older woman and we assumed that the crowd would be small. But as we approached the venue, it appeared that the audience would be enormous, and in fact, although we were early, we were shunted to a line of people waiting to get in. And we wondered if there was room, because the crowd seemed so dense. And we were far from the stage itself, which was not in sight.

We were told to sit down where we were, so we lost hope of getting anywhere near the performance. Next to me, there was a wide gravel path, which I took to be the course on which the horses would race. That, then, turned into a train track and a train came up which we were all told to enter. The train started up and we thought we were being transported to the concert. We went on and on and realized what a long walk (an impossibly long walk) it would have been.

The crowd was shepherded off the train and we all walked slowly forward. Then everyone was halted, and we were divided into two groups. We were in the first line of the second group. The first group kept going forward, but we were directed to the left, up stairs, down stairs, up an escalator, down an escalator, outside into a green area surrounded by monumental concrete buildings that looked like government buildings or maybe museums (I wondered what part of town we were in – this area was new to me), and then back inside and down a long, long, long corridor.

We were all quite distraught. One man read from a document, telling us that just last month, they controlled a crowd of 400,000 at this very place, and wondering why they couldn’t do it now. A young boy of maybe 8 years old looked at the document and said that the document didn’t say last month, but was dated years and years ago. The man apologized.

We never got to the concert and, at some time, we realized we were nowhere near where we wanted to be and that we, and the hundreds or thousands with us, were simply lost.