I woke up this morning from a very long detailed full color dream that combined places I’ve lived and people I’ve known for the past 30+ yeas. It was set mostly in a small town in the Upper Peninsula where I lived 28 years ago. I was on some sort of city bus tour (not that they actually HAD city buses up there then..nor probably now!) and we were driving around the steep streets of the town looking at all the 150 year old homes falling into disrepair. The other women on my tour seemed to be from my current life, runners I know, or people I knew at my previous banking job. Eventually we were at a stop sign headed up a steep mountain road, and somehow I knew the bus was a stick shift and was going to have to shift into first gear which was a near impossibility. I told the others I used to just fly up this hill and through the stop sign and hope no one was coming the other way. Which actually is not true;  in those days I just avoided that particular corner because I did drive a stick shift!

Then in the dream we were on some sort of boat, looking at the lift bridge, but it looked more like a combination of  Mackinaw Bridge and  Brooklyn Bridge (which I walked over this past spring). Later we wandered down one of the neighborhood streets, walking a runner friend of mine (who happened to email me last night though I didn’t read it till this morning, so maybe she was telepathing to me overnight or something!) past the house she grew up in and where her mother still lived (though in fact she never lived up there!). We shopped our way through town, buying stupid little trinkets, and then we went on a tour of the building I used to work in, first attending a meeting there, where some people were upset that we hadn’t told anyone we were coming to visit. The tour itself was aboard some sort of floating silent circular air machine, which went really fast down hallways, and around corners, as if we were part of a video game. Then we were outside again on this machine, and I was wearing an inflatable life jacket that I couldn’t figure out how to get off, and flip flops which didn’t work well on the stamp sand beaches we were walking on.

After all that Katie woke me up with her cold nose and asked to go out. I bundled up in my heavy coat and mittens and we went out into the fourteen degree cold. I felt distracted, still in the dream, and not sure I wanted to be here, more interested in all the people that had come and gone in the night. It made me realize how many lifetimes I have had already, so many years gone by, so many people I’ve known. This morning, for the first time in a long time, after experiencing time collapse in on itself, I feel old.