Reading the last three or four days: collections of ghost and vampire stories. Not because I in any way believe in any of it, but because they're just so doggoned entertaining. Yestereve, having taken a sort of super-valium to calm the fury that had possessed me at one of my sleeping companions' on the lanai's playing there his goddamned boom-box ("Don't you like the Beatles, Bro'?"), I was draggy and snappish all day yesterday, and prone to unrestful little fits of narcolepsy. So it happened that in the long hour before lunch I fell asleep for a few minutes over The Dracula Book of Great Vampire Stories and had a dream--a long dream for so short a while: I was in Rome, walking through the newly excavated Domus Aurea of Nero's, as in fact I did do on my first visit to Rome six years ago. Everything was just as it was then: long narrow apartments and galleries lit by miners' lamps; and at first I felt what I had felt then, a kind of puzzlement at the mingled narrowness and vastness of the structure, without a twinge of anxiety about it. Then I began to feel very much alone (which I was definitely not on my first visit), and the oddity of it all somehow changed to horror at what had begun to seem less like a "house" in which persons might have dwelt than a labyrinth obviously designed for the containment and refection of a beast. I remembered suddenly then the popular myth (among the peasantry) which was believed until the end of the Middle Ages, that Nero had not died and would return....I woke with a start, saying to myself, "So that's why they buried it!"