The flu makes for vivid dreams. While enjoying the flu over Thanksgiving, I dreamed vividly thus:

Walking down a steep, dusty path in the sun, I encounter Sarah Palin hiking her way up. She is wearing cut off shorts, a spray tan, and large dark sunglasses. She is flanked by her smaller children, and there is a spot on her thigh where the spray tan has missed a spot.

Not being as shy in my dreams as I am in person, I go right up to Sarah Palin. I extend my hand, and I say, "Sarah Palin! It's lovely to meet you," or something of that sort. I begin trying to tell her how--all politics aside--I really admire how she stood up to intense media butchery with grace and unflappable strength. Because, all politics aside, I do.

But in my dream, Sarah Palin shushes me. She looks around to see if anyone is listening. She shakes her head. "I'm not Sarah Palin," she says in a stage whisper. "I am Mary Rutherford."

Dream ends with me knowing that she is too Sarah Palin.

Most of my dreams are vague and imprecise, more full of mood than event. And I tend either to only have disturbing dreams or only to remember the disturbing ones. So this one was unusual for me, having a clear plot of sorts, and not being at all disturbing.

I mentioned it to my mother, who asked the all-important question. "Who is Mary Rutherford?" Of course I had no idea. But Sarah Palin very clearly stated that that's who she was. So we googled Mary Rutherford.

Mary Rutherford, it turns out, is the stuff of legend. As the story goes, Mary Rutherford was a Canadian spinster who was jilted at the altar on her wedding day after delivering her virtue to her fiancee the night before. She went on to commit suicide by hanging herself in her wedding gown. Posthumously accused of witchcraft, the legend goes, her head was buried separately from her body, and her spirit continues to haunt the Hanover, Ontario area where she lived. The legend, of course, does not match the facts: Mary Rutherford was in fact a married mother who lived a long non-magical life after emigrating to Hanover from Scotland. She was buried in a local Presbyterian graveyard in 1872--presumably with her head in the coffin along with the rest of her--and her stone survives to this day. The stone is part of the legend, too: It is said that anyone who touches it will eventually break the bone that came into contact with the stone.

So Mary Rutherford was, like Sarah Palin, a magnet for rumor and for scurrilous, quasi-erotic accusation. She was also the inheritor of a rather timeworn tale: The legend surrounding her is that of Dickens' Miss Havisham (also jilted, also rotting away in her wedding dress, also described as a "witch"). And Miss Havisham, like many of Dickens' characters, has a genealogy that combines the outlines of literary characters (among them Collins' Woman in White and Disraeli's Venetia) and biographical details from real lives (Dickens appears to have based her character on the story of an Australian woman named Miss Donnithorne; jilted on her wedding day, she lived out the rest of her days in seclusion, surrounded by the rotting remains of her untouched wedding breakfast).

We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.