Maybe it’s that it’s the first Monday of the year. Maybe it’s that I’m getting more database work today. Maybe it’s that I’ve got friends going back to the cubicle today. Whatever the reason, I had escape dreams last night. Here’s what I mean.

I was in a new city – not my usual empty dream city. It was a Spanish city. And I sent myself back overnight. I was in my regular life, embroiled with my regular work and regular relationships and by the morning I was gone. Inside the dream, it was a Spanish city I’ve been to before but of course I had never been. There was no plane ride. I was just there. With no transit, no passport, no entanglements with strangers, it was the perfect escape. And this city was all the color of an old photograph and the temperature was unremarkable in that it was perfect.

Except I didn’t know where anything was in this city; and things that I recognized were wrong. Even though I wasn’t dressed for it, I stood in a queue for a danceclub for a while until I was told the line would take five hours. I got out of line and went to café on the street. I ran into a friend. In reality this was a fellow I went to art school with that I hadn’t thought of for years. Inside the weave of the dream, he was a long lost friend that I had cheerfully recovered. But, after the initial discovery, the meeting was cheerless.

I was in some vast field on the phone. Two boys were waiting to use the phone and checking out their reflection in a loosely hung wall of aluminum foil stuck up behind the phone. I don’t know who I was talking to on the phone. It was somebody back home. I explained to the person that I had seen an old friend but that he hadn’t changed and I haven’t changed and that at least one of us had had to change or there wasn’t any point. And one of the eavesdropping guys thought that was a particularly insightful thing to say and he made a note of it.

The vast field wad odd. There were a hundred giant balls on top of the earth the consistency of abandoned colostomy bags. I tested one. The skin, it was clearly a skin, would not break. I discovered, perhaps by intuition, that I was on top of a giant bubbling tar pit. Or rather it had been a giant bubbling tar pit but it had atrophied, it had died, and it had formed these giant bubbles of tar on the surface when it died.

There was an old lover there, an antique lover from years ago. She was wet. Her skin glistened. Her ankle, the color of cinnamon, was a magical token. But I don’t remember that we spoke or that we exchanged anything but the magical sentiment of seeing each other.

My escape, after all, was flawed. I wandered this Spanish city of nostalgia – Nostalopolis – and it, joy, or cheer, or passion, it was undiscoverable. I was alone. Without the peace or serenity that being alone can provide. And if I didn’t send myself back home in my dream, when I opened my eyes, when I sat up, I was returned.

“It’s that if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard… because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right?” – Dorothy.

Now I just have to find out what my heart’s desire is.

SS