Returning Dreams in anticlimatic

I get these odd little waking dreams, not as much as I used to sadly, of places that my imagination generates (I think?) and fills out with the subtle details of a lived-in world replete with a heavy sense of lore and history, even if I don’t know what it is exactly.

Have you ever been in a city that’s new to you, and come upon some very old building or scene and just felt the history of the place? That feeling was in my vision, but I wasn’t looking at a building but rather a small community of tent shacks at night, looking down from a slight hill behind this “town,” which was illuminated by campfires at the individual tents and a few hanging lanterns to mark the trail. I can see people in these camp sites. Specific people. Some girl with dark curly hair is sitting on a bench going through a box of something I can’t see.

The smell is of smoke. Wood smoke, but also mixed with something else. Something nastier. Like old burning motor oil. The place felt entire. Like an entire world and timeline separate from here. Could have been a vision of another universe in another dimension for all I know.

There was just a flash of this place. Like a highly detailed still image that could move just a little bit. But it reminded me of other places like that. Places from actual dreams, places that I have been to before in reality across the country.

I was walking home in the dark tonight and saw a pair of legs silhouetted against the sidewalk. At first it was the only indication that there was something standing in the middle of the sidewalk, just ahead of me. As I drew near, I realized I could see his face- lit from the glow of the phone, and as grew nearer still, he heard me coming and stepped out of the way. We made eye contact as I passed, though I was in the dark. I could see his face clearly in the glow- a scarf wrapped around his chin and a hat pulled down. He was scowling, like the night offended him from his little cell phone glowy refuge in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of my house.

There is something about traveling through the dark, and catching the faces of people lit by candles they are carrying, or cellphones now as it happens to be, that sends me spiraling into distant worlds. Memories of candlelit strolls in the winter and all the strangers faces from way back when still oddly imprinted on my brain in the night in the smell of cedar and pine trees and snow.