Dreamscape

A few weekends back I went to visit my friend from preschool (and elementary, middle, high school, Maid of Honor, Godmother to my son...) With great ambiguity we cut through the town we grew up in on our way back to her awesome new home. As we got to the main intersection I had this inexplicable urge to turn right as I remembered a dream I had which took place along that road. It was twilight and I couldn't see too well, but the arrangement of the streets and buildings was exactly the same as it was in my dreams. As I drove around the library more and more dreams flooded back. I followed the path of one dream back over to the Middle school, followed a different dream path around the back of the school into a neighborhood I don't ever remember from waking life, but was completely recognizable from a few recent dreams.

I crossed the main street where I used to shop when I was young- the toy store, the gift shop, the pizza place. Most of the stores had changed over the intervening years, but the layout of the streets was exactly the way I dream of them. (Okay, there was that one dream where the toy store was on the wrong street, but the but the street itself in the dream just the same as in the waking town).

For some reason the parking lot of the Presbyterian church and the Train Station was a mother-lode of dreamscapes, but after zigging back behind what used to be the WaWa and the nursing home I decided I had tried my friend's patience enough, and headed toward our childhood homes. Another set of dreams just about the hedge between her parent's house and the neighbors! She pointed out homes of our old neighbors, who still lived there and who had moved. I barely remembered. But the layout of the streets by that apartment complex... dream after dream in exact detail. Then as we headed for less familiar areas we passed a softball field I had dreamed about only once or twice. I had no idea it existed at all in waking life, and could never have found it for love or money.

Somehow the blueprint of my childhood town is the blueprint of my dreamscapes. My dreaming mind has remembered that place in a way my waking mind never could.