Tag: nostalgia

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Dream Journal

Moving After 10 Years

Moving out of the apartment we’ve lived in for 10+ years, there are new people moving in soon. Various recollections:

  • Shelves and shelves.
  • Packing things away with boxes, yet often while being inside them.
  • Hundreds of semi-forgotten nostalgias.
  • Turning a Brita mini-fridge back into a working water filter fridge, from a litter box.
  • A tiny desiccated plant box, a former fridge magnet.
  • The wood on the top shelf of cabinets has sagged down from all the bottles kept on it, almost to the point of the bottles falling off. One notable unidentified bottle in a high kitchen windowsill, from a hike my wife and I took once on the day that would be our anniversary — except in the narrative, this hike actually occurred on our wedding day.
  • My friend Val was there, to express her sympathies.

A narrow tall Victorian house (like the Carson Mansion in Eureka, California) up on a hill. I’ve negotiated with our landlord or perhaps the temp-stay management to let me store stuff in the attic there. Yet I haven’t even been up there by the time our scheduled check-out date arrives.

During the dream I constantly have the feeling that all the solutions I’ve sorted out over the years are being dismantled, one by one.

A Russian-style hot tub hut with distinctive green tiles is another place we’ve rented, and another place we’re also giving up. Frustratingly, I realize we’ve only visited 2-3 times. On the side, the green ceramic vertical tiles (like long pyramids) have fallen off a small section, revealing what I never noticed — small handmade classical Russian banya tiles, even more beautiful.

Displayed on a rotating platform nearby is a model train made to resemble an expensive handmade miniature yacht, built of metal, wood and cut glass.

“Maep” is a strange word said by a midget which is used to remind me: time is up. Time is up, and I awake.

Categories
Dream Journal

Australia, What Might’ve Been

I go return to Australia now, as myself, a middle-aged man. I end up spending much time reading in a dark pub and saving really good memes. The room where I’m staying is compact and oddly shaped, on the corner between two long rural streets. The whole thing is very much a nostalgia tour but it’s made more difficult on account I didn’t have Google Maps in Australia back then. I remember one thing on my to-do list: “ivywalk”… though I admit I don’t even know what that was. It’s relaxing — yet nostalgia itself is a kind of pain, the bittersweet pain of a place you cannot truly go back to.

At some point near the end of this trip I consider revisiting the town I spent the last days of my younger trip in, Shepparton, where I was humbled as a salesperson and walked up and down the sheep inhabited main street. This is… somewhat close to my real-life waking memories. I try to think of even one person I could visit there, and the one who comes to mind is the charming old lady Josephine, the only customer I feel I actually helped, getting her new bill put under the name she’d always chosen to use: Jo. And yet she was fairly old then, and that was 14 years ago.

Curiously enough — and this is the waking truth — last November I had a brief lucky few hours when I could’ve bought deep discount plane tickets for Qantas 100-year anniversary. I had a three week trip for two all queued up (for $1400!) yet ultimately we decided that even that wasn’t quite low enough for us, what with food and lodging too. I’d quite forgotten about that untaken chance… today would’ve been about when we flew back.