Dreams

When I woke up in the night, I felt contentment.  That is not something I have felt lately.  My real life has been troubling me.  I realized the contentment must have come from a dream, so I thought back on what it was.

In the dream, I thought, "Oops, I got a PhD.  Now I will be even less employable than I was before."  The dream started at that point, when the PhD was over.  I did have the knowledge of the past events though -- I had gone to school because I had been laid off from my job.  I had gotten a PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Pennsylvania.  Now I was living somewhere in the area, not Philadelphia, but eastern Pennsylvania.  (Later, in my subsequent dream, I saw a post card of Harrisburg, and though, "yes, that's where I was in my previous dream.")

Anyway, having just gotten a PhD, I was feeling a bit frustrated.  "I don't want to be a professor!" I exclaimed.  "I don't want to be a researcher."  I think those I said, and then I thought, maybe didn't say, that I didn't want any kind of high-falutin' job that a person with a PhD would get.

There was a room, like a motel room, and they gave me a job as caretaker of the room.  All I had to do was remain in the room 8:30am-4:30pm four days a week.  And in return, it was my room, I lived there.  That is what made me content.  In the dream, having a place to live was the only thing you needed a job for.  So now that I had that, I didn't have to go looking for a high-falutin' PhD job.  The only thing left that I had to do was what I wanted to do, to look for like-minded people.  I thought about how I knew a lot of good people in my old life [the one that is my actual current real life].  I went through the ways I had met the people I knew in my old life, and decided that in this new place I was living, I would go out and meet the folkies, morris dancers, and time bankers.

There were two people who were kind of like my employers, they were like in charge of the room, they had given me this job as caretaker of the room.  I think they already knew and liked me.  Maybe I had lived in the room while working on my PhD.  I liked these people, but they were not the like-minded people I wanted to meet.  One was a man around my generation, maybe a few years older than me.  He was kind of large, kind of overweight.  We lay in bed together in the room, arms around each other.  It wasn't sexual, just snuggly.  It was family.  The other was a younger woman, smaller, thinner.

There was also a woman who was like a neighboring vendor.  She didn't own the room, but she was working something like a deli counter in the room.  I think her name was Becky.  The man introduced me to her.  She was cold to me, but it wasn't personal, she was like that to everyone, so I didn't mind.

Because I wanted to meet folkies, the man told me that tomorrow morning he would be performing at an open mic at a coffeeshop, and I could go with him and he would introduce me to people.

In the other dream that I had later, I was going to a concert with friends.  They were a couple.  We all three sat in the front.  It was a tandem car.  Both of my two friends were driving.  The man on the left in the traditional driver's seat, and the woman in the middle both had steering wheels, gas pedals, break pedals, etc.  The woman was someone I've been thinking about a lot in real life, someone I want to be friends with.  The man was not anyone I know in real life, but was similar to the man in the previous dream.

The concert was in a city, possibly Philadelphia.  I guess maybe we lived outside of the city.  The journey to and from the concert involved driving through a city anyway.   There were a lot of turns onto little roads, it was a complicated route. The two drivers knew the route, but the roads were unfamiliar to me.  I could not tell if they had some sort of GPS or if they just knew it in their heads.  In the dream, I was with them in the car driving to the concert, then at the concert, then with them driving home.  It was daylight when we were driving home, which does not often happen in real concerts.  I don't remember listening to anyone perform at the concert.  I remember being very high up in the seating.  The seating was like that, it got higher as you go up.  I remember talking with my friend (the female driver of the car).  That was when I saw the post card of Harrisburg.  We also decided to go down to ground level, maybe to look at a shop next door, or just to see people.  We were remembering past concerts we had been to, and people we had talked about before.  We were talking about people who were there.  She pointed out someone she knew and told me the name.  We had talked about that person before, so I was trying to remember about who that person was.  There was someone who had two names, a married name and a maiden name, so my friend was like, "That's Miss Newman, do you know who Miss Newman is?" and I was like, "Is it Mrs. Berger?"  No, it wasn't, and I kept guessing.