One of Those Dreams

[16/17 January 1993 note:]

“L

ast night”—literally yesterday afternoon some time—I dreamed one of those dreams that seem full of significance, and linger after even when you’ve awakened. It had all evaporated when I woke up, but fragments clung to my conscious mind like electri­cally charged dust. There was a place—a sort of space left over between two stores or something. There were places to sit and so on, and it was rather dark and gloomy. I noticed [a girl I’d known in high school two decades ago] was in the room, moving about, doing things. At some point we were seated close to each other and I felt her arm touching mine. I thought she didn’t know anyway, and I didn’t pull away because I valued that small shared warmth. Then she did or said something that made it clear that she knew we had this contact too. She said something about having spent a summer in Oklahoma as a teenager. I could­n’t figure out why she spoke of being a teenager as though it was some­thing in the past, and then it hit me that she must have turned twenty since we left school.