Dream Log: Navigating My Subconscious

It’s daytime; the season is nothing really obvious — trees have green leaves on them, but the temperature isn’t sweltering or anything requiring special clothing. I’m in a small town, not one that I recognize (except possibly from other dreams). I’m parking a car in a small gravel parking lot, at a corner, in which are parked no other cars — in fact the streets themselves are empty, as far as I can see. I get out, cross the street at the corner. I am walking slightly uphill as I cross; the block to which I am crossing is nearly at the top of a fairly steep hill.

The block I am standing on now appears to be a large, L-shaped block. I am at the inside corner of the base of the L (I’ve just followed, in fact, the right-to-left path of the hyphen in the phrase “L-shaped”), facing in the direction of the point where the base meets the upright. On this block, to my left — all along the left-hand side — is a gigantic white clapboard church. A block’s length ahead, occupying the entire upright portion of the L, apparently, is a gigantic stone gothic-style church. I’m not even remotely interested in moving up the street in the direction of that church, which for some reason I know is a Catholic one. The one to my left, I know, is a Methodist church. But I don’t go into the Methodist church, either, or walk at all further up this street. Instead, I turn right and cross to the next block.

Next to the sidewalk at the corner I arrive at, on the grass to my right, is a blue postal mailbox (a small one, mounted on a short pole).

This block is a residential one, with individual houses — not very big, but not hovels either — set up on raised, well-maintained lawns, some with ground covers (like ivy) instead of or in addition to grass. (Think of [a specific stretch of a specific street in my hometown], with the low concrete walls separating the sidewalk from the raised lawns.) I don’t believe I know anyone who lives in these houses, but at any rate I don’t enter them, either. Instead, I am apparently headed for some destination quite a ways up this street.

So I just start walking, on the left side of the street.

Eventually, after a few blocks, the residential area gives way to a more commercial one. Now the town does sort of resemble a couple of places I can think of. The most obvious, from the movie last night (Play Misty for Me), is the small town of Carmel-by-the-Sea (a/k/a plain “Carmel”), California. The other — especially in the transition from residential to downtown — is Fernandina Beach, Florida. (The downtown itself, not counting the residential area, also resembles Melbourne, Florida.) Wherever I’ve summoned it up from, the downtown stretch of the street — several blocks along — is lined with single-story brick shops, restaurants, and so on. A few small trees are in the space between storefronts and street proper. Now I am seeing other people (none I recognize) and cars.

At some point I must have crossed this street, for I am now walking on the right side. I enter a small building just past an empty lot.

I’m in a restaurant, seated at a table over against the left wall, by myself. The atmosphere is casual. The floors are wooden, the walls of rough wood like barn siding. Ceiling fans. Good lighting.

I leave the restaurant. Just as I exit the door to the sidewalk, I realize that someone in the restaurant is trying to push an enormous dumpster full of trash through the door behind me. I offer to help, and the dumpster eventually — after much pulling and pushing and grunting — somehow fits through the doorway. Once outside, it appears to be one of those dumpsters found at construction sites, maybe 30 feet long, 10 feet or so wide and high (much to big to have fit through the door, in fact), and open at the top. The person at the other end tells me to put it with the others around back and for some reason I agree to do this as though it were expected of me in the first place.

By myself, I drag the dumpster along the sidewalk and up onto the empty lot to the back of the restaurant. But the lot is no longer empty; in fact, it’s full of other such dumpsters, each of them loaded with trash and garbage, and the whole lot of them are reeking slightly in the daylight…

Now I’m headed back to my car, retracing my steps, walking back on what is now of course the right side of the street. I have a vague sense of watching out for the gay couple, as though they’d threatened me somehow. Eventually I stop seeing any more people, and see no cars anymore. I come to the corner across the street from the L-shaped block, with the mailbox at my left – the Methodist church is over there on the far side of the street — but I don’t cross to it. Instead, I turn left and cross over that street, instead.

As I step off the curb, I am suddenly aware that in my left hand I am carrying about a half-dozen cassette tapes. Most of them have been recorded from LP to tape, so their labels are handwritten, but one or two is a commercial-grade cassette. I realize I’m carrying them now because just as my foot hits the street, they fall out of my hand — there really are too many to carry in one hand — and clatter to the sidewalk at the base of the mailbox. I look down, disgusted at my clumsiness, and shake my head. But I don’t pick them up. I just cross over the street, presumably on my way back to the car in the otherwise empty gravel parking lot…

I wake up.