Dreaming Real: The Empty Shelves

I woke up this morning at about ten minutes to five, needing to answer (as they say) the call of nature. But it took me several minutes to get out of bed, because I’d awoken from a dream of startling clarity — everyday clarity, at that, with nothing fanciful or otherwise “dreamlike” about it — and for whatever reason, I thought I needed to hang onto the details. The dream went like this…

—

The Missus handed me a large can of Del Monte string beans. “I need another one of these,” she said, “for a recipe.” I told her I’d run to the store, and take the can with me to be sure I got the right kind and size.

Wherever we lived in this dream, it was sufficiently “out in the sticks” that there was no supermarket closer than a half-hour away. But there was a store maybe 5-10 minutes away, and that’s where I headed.

It was the kind which is maybe still called a “general store.”

Out front, the parking lot was asphalted over, and a couple of battered old gas pumps in the middle of the lot, sheltered beneath a battered old awning. The building itself was a longish ranch-style, not at all new, a single story raised a couple feet above ground level on blocks, and the exterior walls were made of logs: dark brown logs. (Think: the Village Shops at Rancocas Woods, NJ, or any of various shops in Medford Lakes, NJ.) A large picture window was set in the left front wall (as you faced the building). About a half-dozen concrete steps led you up to the entrance, which was offset to the left of center (just to the right of the picture window). When you entered the door, you were in the general-store proper, with the cashier’s counter over against the left wall and a small set of shelves in the middle of the floor and around the walls where the various goods were displayed. No refrigeration, to my knowledge: the shelves were just for things like loaves of bread, canned fruit and vegetables, charcoal, pasta, and so on.

But the real reason I liked coming to this store for everyday things like my Del Monte string beans was the smaller room at the right end of the building. The wall over on that side of the main store extended only about ¾ of the way from the front to the back; when you passed from the main area through that open section of wall, you were then in a smallish bookstore, with a limited, eclectic, and rather eccentric collection of books, almost none of them duplicates. By no means was it “well-stocked,” but I always knew when I stopped at this place that I’d walk out with something interesting to read.

Well, on this visit, I entered the main store — can of Del Monte string beans in my hand — nodded at the woman over by the register, and walked straight back, turning right, to the bookstore.

The proprietor was there. I knew her by name in the dream, can’t remember it now; but she was short, of a slight build, with a sort of off-blonde, maybe strawberry-blonde hair color, and she spoke in a charmingly chipper voice: she reminds me now, in retrospect, of somebody like Amy Adams, early in her career, so I’ll call her Amy here.

So anyway, I noticed Amy, and said hey to her. But mostly I was looking around the bookstore: not walking, just standing there, turning my head, staring. There were no books. The shelves were bare.

“Amy,” I said, “the books…?”

“I know,” she said, ruefully. “It’s been a while since you’ve been here, hasn’t it? We had to give it up.”

“But the main store—“

Lips pursed, she shook her head. “That, too.”

Dumbfounded, I turned around to look back into the main store. Yes: all the shelves were empty. The cashier’s counter still had a cash register on it, I guess for the gasoline sales. But by no stretch of the imagination was I going to pick up a large can of Del Monte string beans — or anything else — on this visit.

I turned back to Amy, thinking to ask her what had happened. They just couldn’t make a go of it economically, family health disaster, or what?

But before I could ask, Amy said, “You know, it’s the funniest thing: when you were coming up to the door, I thought to myself and I said to [Edna? the cashier], ‘Why, that looks like John Simpson!’ It’s good to see you today, John.”

“It’s… it’s good to see you, too.”

At that point, [Edna?] came into the back area of the store. She was carrying several white plastic bags of groceries, which she put down on a table. They clunked, and one of the bags slipped down so I could see the contents: cans of Del Monte vegetables, but no string beans.

I left the store, got back into my car and drove off, and I woke up.

—

This dream has several features which jump out at me right away:

First, there’s the simple, stark familiarity of it all. It’s going to bother me for weeks that I can’t think of the real store which features here — the asphalt, the gas pumps, the log walls, the main store and the small bookshop off to the side — because it was too, well, plain to be a dream-setting, you know? and too real to be imaginary.

True, there were a couple just-a-bit-strange elements: it occurs to me now, for instance, that I don’t think I’ve ever heard my name — full name — spoken aloud by a character in a dream. As for that character, looking back over the last couple hours, I have no sense that I know a real-life Amy-and-[Edna?], although they and I obviously knew one another in the dream.

But I think what strikes me most about the dream is the books — the absent books, especially in context with Amy’s apparent surprise to see me there…

Years ago, a therapist and I were talking about dreams and what they “mean,” or rather what we think they mean, or even better, what we want to think they mean. (The supernatural — the metaphysical — elements of dreams easily lend themselves to metaphorical interpretation.) Steve was not at all of a Freudian bent, but he did share with me a way to regard dreams about evidently notable buildings which we explore: they’re dreams about ourselves…

Meanwhile, back in the present day, over at my old friend Marta’s blog, she’s fretting (as she sometimes does) about her writing: if she is indeed a writer (as she believes, and as I believe her to be), then where’s the evidence? Aside from her published work, and copious (physical/digital) draft manuscripts, why isn’t there more? Why doesn’t she feel like a writer? (These are not Marta’s words, by the way, and I don’t know if they truly express the heart of her discontent.) All of which, as it happens, mirrors stuff going on in my own head, about my own writing, and in the comments thread on her most recent post we’ve shared a mutual angst which — for my part, at least — seems to have gone past discouragement, even past despair, to a kind of cold-blooded but clear-eyed understanding that I simply have not turned out to be, and maybe never could be, whatever I once meant by “a writer.”

Oh, I continue to put phrases and sentences together. Mechanically, I’m pretty sure I’ll always be “a writer.” But when I rummage around in my head, looking for stories and characters and how to put them together and out into the world… and more importantly, looking for the motivation to do so?

Yeah: the shelves are bare. If Amy, or “Amy,” is my Muse, no wonder she was surprised that I showed up out of nowhere. And in retrospect, I believe, it’s telling that as I turned to leave…:

She didn’t call me back.