Caveat: What Language Am I Dreaming?

I slept in later than usual, this morning. I was busy having a slow-moving dream.

I had gone to visit my uncle in Craig, Alaska. I had further decided to rent a room in town rather than stay out at his place. So I was apartment hunting.

I found this place that seemed half under-construction on the road between Craig and Klawock, a rambling half-old, half-new house built with a diversity of materials, including wood, concrete block, and steel siding. I walked around inside and was dismayed by how messy it seemed, but then in the back, in the area of the new construction, the house was immaculate. I waited for a long time to meet the landlord. Somehow I'd just walked into the place on my own – perhaps I'd been granted permission over the phone?

I looked out the back door and gazed at the sky spattered with gray and the unending green of the nearby mountain, and the infinite random cratering of puddles in the gravel parking area, that, like all parking areas in Alaska, always seem too large for their accompanying structures.

Finally, after a few hours, I met an elderly woman that looked Indonesian or Southeast Asian, accompanied by a Native American man. The woman said something to me about how she wasn't sure she wanted to rent the room to me, but then she turned and said something in Korean to the man she was with. I understood it well enough to react – I think it was something to the effect of would I be messy like the current tennants or clean up after myself, and so I interrupted and said I would be clean – in my stumbling Korean.

The woman's eyes widened and the man turned toward me speculatively. Somehow it didn't seem incongruous to me that a Southeast Asian woman and Native American man would be speaking Korean to each other in rural Alaska.

The woman said to me, continuing in Korean, "Oh, so you speak Korean?"

I took a breath – inside my dream. Dreaming in languages I don't know well always seems ambiguous – am I dreaming the actual language, or some mental construct? This is a puzzling problem that has preoccupied me since middle school. And what's odd is that this is the actual thought that occurred to me within my dream at this juncture.

The fact that I spoke Korean, however badly, somehow gained the trust of the woman, although after our halting exchange, she immediately began to criticize my ability, in a nagging, somewhat intrusive manner. "How long was it you were in Korea? How is it you can only speak like that?"

I finalized my rental of the room at the place and went outside, feeling uncertain about whether the construction going on at the site would be completed when I came back to move in – although I ccouldn't recall when, in the dream, I was supposed to move in.

It was overcast and drizzling – very typical Craig weather. I went to get in my uncle's truck (which I guess I'd borrowed and was driving around) but found someone had attached a boat trailer to it. My uncle suddenly walked out of a nearby hardware store that I hadn't noticed before. In that instant, in a very dream-like way, Craig, Alaska was resembling White Bear Lake, Minnesota, with many more – and more stately – houses, and decidious trees and streets meeting at right angles and mini-malls near intersections, with the water hovering in the distance looking much more lakey and less fiordy.

My uncle was grinning.

"What's this?" I asked, gesturing at the boat trailer.

"I don't know," he said in his laconic manner. "But I like it."

We got into the truck and drove back down the Port Saint Nicolas Road toward his house. The windshield wipers did most of the talking.

I woke up when we reached the bend at the head of the fiord, aroumd mile 7.

I didn't even realize I'd slept in until after I'd made some coffee and sat down to write this dream – the light coming in my window didn't feel "late."

Here is a picture I took in October, 2009, from my uncle's porch, looking out eastward toward the head of the fiord.

[daily log (1145 pm): walking, 5 km]