Dreams, dreams, dreams....
Last night my dreams were neither fantastical nor especially colorful, and yet they remain in the memory more than they should.
The first dream: I'm staying in some woman's house and I find, in the bathroom, a piece of sheet music. It's in A major. I know that my job is to take it to someone who's having a music rehearsal down the block. I steal the music and misplace it, then go back looking for it in the bathroom, and it's no longer there … but then I find it again, only it's changed, now it's got a green cover and appears to be a Peters Edition.
So, rather furtively, I tuck it under my arm and leave the house - it has an inner, wire mesh door and an outside wooden door, and go down the street which is like a New York city block. And yes, I approach the building where I have to deliver the music and I hear a chorus singing this rhythm: Hey - you - heyyouheyyou - Hey - you - heyyouheyyou over and over (first minims then crochets, alternating) ... I enter the building which is sort of like a school building, and the the chorus sings louder and louder ...
Many hours later I have another dream of surprising mundanity ... it takes place in an oblong room which appears to be the ground floor of a house I find myself living room. I am my secretary Ratana are sitting on opposite sides of the room. She is at a desk typing and she has on her desk a set of hanging red file folders each one of which is very clearly labeled (nothing could be further from reality — perhaps this IS the fantasy element of the dream.)
On my side of the room, there are some filing cabinets. I am sorting out everything in my life and filing it away piece by piece. One of the filing cabinets is lying on its side on a large desk. I fill it with carefully labelled files under different categories and move the cabinet so it stands neatly with other cabinets. I find there is one extra cabinet on the furthest right (the cabinets are arranged to form a U shape) so I tell Ratana she now has a place to put her files away, they don't have to mess up her desk anymore.
I open the cabinet and find that it has no shelves; it is an empty shell.
The shelves must be outside, I tell her. She says to me, "You know, I've never regretted I don't have a television at work; I don't watch television." I tell her I am so sorry she can't watch her favorite shows at work.
I open the front door (which is actually a back door) into an alley, and there is a bunch of furniture that never seems to have been moved into the house. Among the furniture is an old fashioned dark mahogany bookcase with elaborate scrolled carving. There's also a simple, bright red painted wooden bookcase. I locate the missing pieces of the filing cabinet, and i wake up.
What is strange about those two dreams is that they take place in very ordinary places, not palaces or weird attics or bizarre spacecraft and there are no animals or monsters. They are the most earthbound dreams I ever remember having, and that in itself is sort of fantastical...