A Dream had One Winter Morning

Most nights I don’t remember my dreams.  Awaking I may have a feeling that a dream was fun, frightening or odd but the content of the ethereal fantasy is usually lost to me and lost very quickly.  Some mornings as I rouse myself from my flannel sheets I may think that a dream was so striking that I will remember every detail.  Within five minutes the particulars and specifics have mostly if not completely flow.

Last night was different.  The dream was striking and quite vivid.  My mind was filled with so much detail that I pulled out my iPhone as soon as I sat up on the edge of the bed. Quickly I dictated as much as I could remember.

In the first vignette of the reverie I was trying to buy concert tickets. In the world of the dream you could only buy the tickets at the theater. As a result, I was standing at first in a small venue in a town where I had lived 40 years ago. Dreams add layers to every single element, and so it turned out the music hall was inside of a performing arts high school.

Glancing around it seemed he old brick building was falling down. With dark red brick, dark stained wood and long wide staircases the place had a Harry Potter like feel to it. Wandering around I kept looking for the box office.

As I walked the halls I ran into my old legal secretary. She was dressed in white but I could not make sense of what she was saying. Teens were suddenly everywhere singing songs from recent musicals and running lines from Shakespeare. It was a cacophony. My secretary smiled and faded away.

With all this going on the real world intruded. My heart felt regrets over not sending my son to the school. But I was there to get tickets damn it and so I searched everywhere for somebody to sell me tickets. Eventually a uniformed person wrote my name on a clipboard and told me I had tickets. But there was no receipt and I was stressed.

Out of nowhere someone I kind of knew from years ago gave me coins.  Talking quickly, they told me the coins were of some value and that I could either hold or use them. I was confused completely. I decided to get some air.

Leaving the school, I passed a beautiful bucolic scene where a new elegant restaurant had been built.  The trendy bistro was not yet opened for the day. But I so wished to eat there. Continuing on I walked past a street that had been important in my life but it was different. While the signs were just as gaudy as they had ever been, with neon and blinking arrows, the joy of the place I had felt before was gone. And then I awoke.

In the end as I sat there on the edge of the bed I was in an utter melancholy funk thinking wistful thoughts filled with regrets.

Me, I don’t think dreams mean much.  I have a quarterly dream of hands reaching out of a grate or from under a door grabbing for my ankles. I am not worried about someone abducting me, although I have been having this dream every three months for thirty years.  I am pretty sure I was not abducted as a child.  It was just a dream. Still, a dream can set our mood for a day.  So be it.