Last night I dreamed I was wandering around the Seoul subway – which is maybe realistic given I've been taking the subway a lot more, recently, due to my many visitors, than in my usual lifestyle.
The subway was full of people from previous periods of my life – from my work in Burbank or Long Beach, from grad school at Penn in Philadelphia, from the US Army, from my undergraduate years at Macalaster and the University of Minnesota. I found a group of people that included some Burbank coworkers along with some acquaintances from my undergraduate years in a long pedestrian passage of the subway, where they were apparently staging a talent show.
I was invited to join in, but I said I had no talent. So I sat down on the floor to watch. There were several children performing a puppet show, but the stage-window apparatus fell down, so they were just sitting on the floor holding the puppets up. All through this, regular subway patrons kept walking past, oblivious.
Many of the people present were discussing the puppet show, saying how badly the children were doing. One girl had on a frilly dress and was weilding a dragon puppet and was having trouble disentangling the long tendrils attached to the dragon-puppet's head from the ruffles on her dress. You could see she was on the verge of tears with frustration. A boy had a puppet of a hunter or soldier, but he wasn't holding it up above his head, so he was blocking the view of it with his head and other arm. I felt compelled to defend the children's efforts against the criticisms of the audience, but I was being ignored. Finally, I gave up and wandered off through the subway again.
I awoke and it was 4 am. My apartment had become quite chilly – the weather station on my phone said it was 5 degrees (C) out. I know my mother – staying with me currently – doesn't like cold, so I closed my window. I lay awake for a long time – for some reason the fragment of dream stayed vividly with me.