doors and dreams
I had a dream last night that I was getting ready to go to my guitar lesson, and I woke up thinking oh, its Tuesday afternoon and I need to go to my guitar lesson. The only thing, I haven't gone to a guitar lesson in close to 20 years. In that dream though, it felt like the present. I saw the clock in my school hitting the 2:55 mark, and began packing up, a wayward glance at my guitar in the corner of the room, the beat up chipboard case held together with duct tape and stickers.
I began thinking of all the different lives I've lived within this one. Guitar lessons after school, walking to a local photo lab to an internship where I spent an afternoon loading 35mm film leads onto translucent plastic cards to be put through the developing machine, running through the woods with my sibling in the first house we grew up in, where sticks were cigarettes and the pine trees gave us shelter.
I'm thankful for my dreams now, because I can still live those parts of my life in my subconscious, drifting into any one seemingly at random. Its like being in a room with many doors, and you know there's something interesting behind each one, because you've lived behind each one, but you're not sure where they'll go exactly.
For years, even sometimes to this day (but not so much since 2019 or so), I had this recurring dream where I was returning to my first apartment. The one on Pine st, where I lived with the first person I loved, where I fell off my bike and broke my hip, where I listened to records and got high night after night with friends I mostly don't see anymore (except for a very special handful). I was doing a walk through before moving out, just returning to grab a few more things that didn't make it into the car en route to my next apartment. The apartment was bathed in a hazy, soft light, but I was unsure of where it was coming from. There was the gesso spill on the carpet in one of the bedrooms, a hard plastic like splatter from an accident the second year of school. All the furniture was out though, there were just a few cardboard boxes in each room, and I remember digging through them, as if at a thrift store, thinking to myself oh, I can keep this here for now, I'll hide it and come back later, but I don't remember exactly what those objects were, just that they corresponded with things from my past that I was unable to find even to this day, those odds and ends that inevitably get lost in moves.
Even more than 10 years after that move, I still have this feeling, from this recurring dream, that if I went to that building, I could convince the property management team to let me in so I could collect those forgotten objects, even though I know, without a doubt, obviously they are long gone.
I guess I'm just constantly amazed at the power of dreams, and wonder whenever I enter that world, what my mind is trying to remind me. I'm thankful that I so diligently recorded those years on 35mm film, and in the music I listened to, in my record collection. These are the physical anchors that hold me to who I was years past.