I've had some strange dreams, lately. This morning, I woke up after dreaming I was hectically trying to pack up all my possessions so that I could start a new job in a distant place. This is an accurate enough revisit to the days before my departure, last August, from Minnesota. But the place where I am doing the hectic packing is a sort of reconstruction of my apartment in Philadelphia from 95-96, not the place I was in last year in Minnesota. And I keep losing my focus and going on these long, purposeless walks through an urban-industrial wasteland that looks like a cross between West Philly and Hibbing, MN (itself a sort of Eureka-on-the-Tundra, if you can visualize). I find abandoned subway stations and randomly distributed boxes of old maps or books, that turn out to have been mine, once-upon-a-time.
I return to my apartment, only to drift away again. The packing isn't getting done, and time is ticking away. Finally I look at a clock and it's 23 minutes after midnight (what does THAT mean?). I hurry to an attic space that doesn't resemble the Philadelphia apartment but instead looks exactly like attic in the H Street house in Eureka (circa 1974?). But it's full of all my damn books, not in boxes and packed, as I'd left them, but back on shelves. And then I hear music downstairs, and I go to see who's awake, and I fall down the stairs… I don't feel terror or pain at the falling, but a kind of visceral frustration at the lack of control. And I reach the bottom of the stairs, and some unknown woman is standing there impatiently glaring at me, and I wake up.