I don’t remember my dreams very often; it seems that the only times that I remember my dreams are when they are exceptionally bizarre or frightening. I remember a dream from last night.
I was at a house that I don’t recognize, but it was my house, and people like my family were there, but they were not my family. The walls were an eggshell white and the lights were incandescent. The floor that I remember was a worn-out, slightly grimy linoleum and every room that I remember seemed like a kitchen, but there were no appliances: no refrigerator, no range, no dishwasher. Just exposed incandescent lightbulbs casting their yellow light on eggshell-white walls and illuminating the worn-out, slightly grimy linoleum floor.
My dreams tend to have objectives; I always have to do something or go somewhere or find someone. In this dream, I was aware that the moon was completely enormous and it felt so close. It wasn’t any brighter, for all this closeness, but it just hung up there in a sky in which I could, inexplicably, still see lots of stars. I knew this because all of the rooms that I remember were really just one room, and that room had traditional four-pane windows. Looking outside through the windows, and it didn’t matter which window I looked through, I saw the big, close moon up there with some wispy clouds and those persistent stars. My objective was to somehow get onto the roof and photograph that moon.
When I realized this, I noticed a door that I had not noticed before. I opened it because I knew that behind this door was the ladder up to the attic. The incandescent light was still there in this ladder-room and in the attic, and the walls and floors and ladder were all exposed, brown-stained wood. I climbed up to the attic, and looked out one of the still-four-pane windows that lined the walls with no particular regularity. The moon was even bigger that it had been before. What strikes me right now is that I don’t remember there being a ground outside; no trees, no grass, no fences.
I pushed on one of the four-pane windows because I knew that to open the window, I had to push it out of its frame. It fell out and kind of skidded and clattered down the gray-shingled roof, but I don’t remember whether it slid all the way off the roof or not. I stepped out onto the roof and picked up my camera, which had apparently been sitting there all this time. I sat down and looked at the moon, and then Rebecca was sitting next to me, and we talked and watched the moon as it grew and grew, always closer, never brighter.
