Dream: Old Friends

Wandering around downtown. Night or just dream-dark. Some women playing pickup baseball under undefined lights in an empty lot. Three with red hair, one very tall, one short, details of the other lost after I woke. I recognize one. It's [old friend]. The tall one, I think. I keep walking. In an out of buildings, a crowd, a 7-11. I'm carrying an instrument in a case and it's heavy. I stash it in an abandoned building. I come back to the pickup game, sneak glances through the chain link fence. They're all three of them lovely, and I feel like I'm young again. Wander away, back to the building with my instrument, sit down at a picnic table near the lot, and talk to someone off-dream. The case is open. My instrument is out, in pieces. The women finish the game, wander over, sit at the table. We try making sounds on the instrument, which isn't a real instrument, but looks like some sort of awkward French horn: five or ten interlocking pieces (a bell, a mouthpiece, bits of tubing), none of which seem to fit particularly well. I can't make a sound. I look over at the woman who I think is my old friend. She isn't looking at me. The small redhead sitting next to me is, though, intently. I understand via dream-logic that I've had it wrong, that the tall woman is not who I think she is, that the tall woman is actually no one at all.

I put the instrument case back in the abandoned building. The small redhead and I go for a walk. She takes my hand without saying a word. I whisper to her. "I didn't think you even remembered me." She says nothing, but smiles back at me. The approval of phantoms.

I wake. It's still early. I look around. I fall back asleep. The woman and I are again holding hands, and walking through a long and sloping skywalk. My brain tells me this is a university tunnel, like the ones that ran underground, building to building, where I used to go to school. We see groups of people sitting at tables. One of which I recognize immediately. Tall, blonde, short beard, round black glasses. Another old friend, one I haven't talked to in-person in more than twenty years, since I bumped into them at a record shop downtown in the city in which I used to live. But, they and I keep up on Facebook. I go over, give them a hug. Introduce my other old friend.

Wake. 6:08. Seven minutes till my alarm will go off. The dogs need to get up, be fed, walked. But this dream was so startlingly vivid. I tell myself I need to get the laptop out quickly, to write all this down. I go downstairs, feed the dogs, sit down at the dining room table. Open my laptop. Try to focus. And type this.