Dreams

Over the past few months I’ve been remembering a lot of dreams. I’ve even written about a few of them. These are two dreams that I had one morning last week. I’ve had several dreams (including the first) in a town I can’t place. It’s on the eastern slop of a mountain (like Virginia City, NV, Truckee, CA or Helena, MT), but there’s more vegetation and kind of looks like a coal mining town in Appalachia, with the exception that the landscape to the east is flat and desert-like. In the two dreams below, there was only one person I knew, a colleague from India who worked with me a few years ago in a job exchange program. Since railroad tracks were in the one dream, I’m posting a photo I took in August 1988, of tracks crossing the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

The conference ended and I was walking the streets. My plan was to hang around another day and explore the town and have a few beers in one of the bars along Main Street, a windy road clinging to the mountainside and dotted with old buildings. Below the street with the bars and restaurants were the train tracks that cut through the mountains and then dropped to the eastern plains. Everyone was leaving by train. As I walked the streets I saw a group of my colleagues heading back to the hotel. Dueto some mix-up, they were going to have to stay another night and it seemed that everyone, except me, was out of money. I mentioned, half jokingly, that I had a half loaf of bread and some peanut butter back in my room and I invited them up. On the way back, I stopped at a little grocery and picked up some beer, soft drinks and other sandwich makings, deciding I might as well make it a party. This wasn’t what I wanted to do even though I knew it was what I was supposed to be doing. I’d had my heart set on an evening of anonymity, sitting in the back of a smoky bar and watching a band and writing in my journal. Now I was being the gracious host. Everyone was appreciative and the next morning we were on the platform waiting for the train when I woke up. The clock said 4:30 A.M.

After a few minutes, I fell back asleep and found myslef with Joel, a friend from India. We were in a Muslim country and the sun had just set and we were getting ready to eat at a banquet. It must have been Ramadan, with the faithful fasting between sunrise and sunset. For some reason, we didn’t want anyone to know that we were not Muslim, as if we were on some kind of undercover mission. Although Joel is Christian, he’d lived among Muslims in India, so I suggested he go first and that I would follow his example. There were many tempting treats on the table, including sushi and oysters on the half-shell, but I noticed Joel and the others avoiding them. I couldn’t remember if Muslims ate shellfish or uncooked meat, so I stood there looking at the table as the alarm rang. It was now 5:30 AM and time to get up.