Jonathan Lethem on Lucid Dreaming

Your story "The Afterlife" opens as a group of passengers are riding a bus to the afterlife. When did that image first come to mind? I'm forced to admit that ninety per cent of this story came to me in a dream, in January this year. It was a semi-lucid dream, one in which I experience a kind of meta-commentary layer in which I thought about how much the elements might comprise a short story if I woke up and wrote them down. I've had that luck, if it is luck, just three or four other times.