Pánfilo de Narváez

Just shy of a year.

I honestly thought they were gone. That the dreams truly were just a product of the medicine I was taking. I say 'was' because one result of the events of last year was that I stopped taking those medicines, and it turned out that I didn't need to start back up again. On the one hand that was a very positive development. But on the other I now know that the dreams weren't simply an odd side effect.

Still strange. Still with no apparent meaning. But still dealing with a real place that I have never been to. Once again I felt the mounting anxiety when I woke, that need to find the place and mark it. Claim it. But just like the last time, nearly a year ago, the dream showed me where it was. Where it is still. A little park and boat ramp dedicated to a little known conquistador.

I have no more insight now than I did a year ago, perhaps even less so since it seemed so apparent that the dreams were the result of the pills. The logical thing would be to accept this for the (hopefully) mild neurosis that is almost certainly is and talk to someone trained in dealing with these types of issues.

I wonder if I am still that logical.

12th Street Bar & Grill

At least I know for certain that I have never been to this place, since it appears that it has only been there in its current form for about 12 years or so. I'm fairly sure that I would remember if I had.

Was it naive to think that I would only have one dream like the one from last week? But it's not the dream itself (themselves?), although as I mentioned they have been so much more vivid than I am used to, it's the feeling of compulsion that I felt from the moment I awoke. It was the same feeling as before, an urgency to locate the place where the events of the dream had taken place. At least in this case it was easy, strangely enough - but I have no idea where I have ever seen that place referenced before. As I said, I know that I have never been there. Anyway, the feeling didn't last as long this time, since I already knew about Google maps and since I more or less had the address of the place in the dream. I just typed in the name of the bar and it can right up. I could tell from the little thumbnail picture that it was the right place. As soon as I marked it and wrote about what had happened in the dream, the feeling of stress and anxiety faded quickly away.

I called and made an appointment with Dr. Patrick. I know that this is not that big a deal, and that the chance of this being related to my medicine is very small, but it is about time for my annual anyway and I would rather be safe. After the fact, the unease doesn't seem all that extreme, but feeling anything for no good reason is what makes me a little uncomfortable.

I don't want to discount the stress I have felt in these two situations, but I have to admit that it is interesting to have something...interesting happen to me. I'm not sure that anything out of the ordinary has ever happened to me before. I wonder if I just didn't see, or admit, certain things when I was working? Being in such an analytical field, and being that type of person by nature, it was easy to see things only in terms of how they fit into a flow chart or a process diagram. All in all, though, it just seems like nothing very odd has ever happened to me before. That is either very fortunate or very sad.

Maybe this is the first stirring of a general anxiety related to getting older. I am not aware of being concerned about my age (or even about my undoubted eventual mortality), but I guess that is the exact nature of those types of neuroses; your body or your mind is trying to tell you that you are concerned, even when you would swear that you are not. (Does anyone say that word any more? You never hear that now, but it was all over the place when I was young.)

But I have always been a firm believer that your mind is not as sneaky or conniving as pop psychology would have us believe. It has always seemed to me that people know when they have issues and that, if they are honest with themselves, they even know when they are trying to convince themselves otherwise.

Since I did have another dream and since it was accompanied by the exact same feeling, I have to wonder if it will happen again. Or if I will start feeling this geographic compulsion about other things. God, I hope not. What if I were to start feeling that I must fix in space the place of origin of every can of peas or frozen pizza that I buy at the store? Or plot where every piece of mail that I receive came from? I'm joking, of course, but maybe I shouldn't be.

At least I can be reasonably sure that the dreams themselves have no meaning. I certainly did not know any of the women that I saw in my dream last night. Although the last one, the one with the brown hair and freckles, made me think of many of the girls I had seen when I was working in Austin that year. I'm sure a psychologist would tell me that my brain is trying to tell me that I don't know who I am. Or maybe that there is more to me than I will admit. Or maybe that I should drink more coffee. With pretty girls.

Don't need a therapist to tell me that.

Just thinking

After the strangeness of the past two nights I figured why not add a little more. Why not go ahead and do this thing that I've put off doing for so long. Even if I have thought the idea was somewhat interesting, I hate what they call it. Blog. Blogging. I thought it was stupid when I first heard it years ago and I still think it is stupid. But I was busy then and there have been so many more ridiculous names since. Twitter. Vimeo. Hulu. Lulu. Zazzle. Even if you spend very little time on the web, as I have, you can't get away from the news and even the Journal covers this stuff more or less constantly. At least YouTube makes a certain sense.

But I'm not getting any younger and I am certainly too old at this point to care much about silly product names. I was then, too, if I'm honest. But I had to get a Google ID to save the map and I noticed after I signed up that the ID gave me access to a couple dozen other products and services and one of them was this. Blogger. In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.

But the map is an incredible product, and as easy to use as Tyler said, which is the main thing. I was a little concerned about that, Tyler being the type of boy who finds everything easy. He's grown up with this stuff. They all have. The map really impressed me, though, while at the same time showing me just how far out of touch I am. Hard to believe that it was only about ten years ago that we all got the big stay of execution. Y2K. The last hooray for us old COBOL guys, the final reason for us to hang around a little longer and feel like we were still a part of it.

But that's all over now, and just as well. This isn't about those days anyway, at least I hope it isn't, just thought I should make some notes to be sure that I don't forget anything. Funny, but as clear as it all was for almost two days straight, as soon as I found the place it seemed like it turned into more of a normal dream, fading away like they normally do. Plus I kind of like the idea of Tyler being able to check this out. He might get a charge out of it.

But follow along with what? I have to admit that I got the image of Richard Dreyfus from Close Encounters in my head at some point and then I couldn't get it out, as I was searching though every book I own for a map or an atlas of the US. I wonder if that would have helped. Is it a good sign that I realized I was obsessing? Not having ever been an obsessive person by nature, it didn't concern me too much, but perhaps I'm looking at that backwards. I even thought to myself at one point, "At least I'm not shoveling dirt through my kitchen window."

Odd enough, though. I've never even had a particular interest in maps. I can use one when I need to. I know how to use them even for navigation. I still remember all that from when we had the sailboat back in the late 80's. And I appreciate what a map is, in terms of information management. That probably just comes with my old profession, and I feel that way about many things. I am not what I would call a 'map person', though, not a collector or anything like that. But then again I've never been a particularly lucid dreamer, either.

The first thing I did this morning was call the pharmacist. I wanted to make sure nothing had changed with my last refill. I remember the stories Don told that time that he had started on a new course of meds, about how strange his dreams had suddenly become. But my last refill was over a month ago. Surely if the dream was related to that, that side-effect would have popped up before now. The pharmacist confirmed that there was almost no way the pills I take (for cholesterol) would trigger vivid dreams like that. Or manic behavior, he said.

It wasn't that I had to find a map. It was really more that I had to locate the place that I had seen in my dream. The feeling wasn't nearly as strong yesterday, either. Then, it was more like the feeling you sometimes get when you wake up from a nice dream and you really don't want it to fade away. You lay there in bed hoping that you will drift back off to sleep, to the exact place in the dream that you were when you woke up. But that almost never happens. Not to me, anyway. Usually I just get more awake, and the dream fades further away until I realize that it's not there any more, then I get out of bed.

That's what was so different about this dream. Even on the first night, before I had the same dream again last night. It stayed with me all day yesterday, as vivid and real as if I were still asleep. How utterly quiet the dream world was, completely still and quiet except for the motion of the swing and the rough squeak of the chain, metal on metal, almost like fingernails on a slate, but more metallic. And everything so grey.

But why am I writing all this here again when I've already put it on the map - which was at least as strange as all the rest of this. As soon as I found the little park I knew it was THE park, even before I discovered the Street View feature of the map. Then, from the street view, I was doubly sure. It looked a little different in my dream, mainly the swing set was older, just a metal A-frame with four swings. Like we had when I was a kid. And of course there was no hangman's grove.

I still think I must have seen in my dream how the place looked when I was young. I can't think of any other explanation than that we must have visited someone there when I was very little. Maybe I went to play at that park with the children of whoever we had gone to visit. Does Cleveland have a large Polish community? Wouldn't surprise me. It really reminds you how much you miss your parents when they aren't there to ask a simple question.

The obsessive, sort of panicked feeling went away as soon as I found the place. I put a marker - bright green seemed appropriate - by the playground and right away the whole episode started to feel like a normal dream.

So hopefully that's over. Maybe, like Scrooge, it was just a bad potato. Who knows. But I am glad for something to kick my butt a little way into this century. Millennium. That map is very cool. I thought it would be interesting to mark some more places from my life and make some notes. Something for Tyler, and probably Maggie too, to check out. It made me think of being little and hearing mom and dad speaking Polish, back when they still did much of the time. So that's why I gave it that title. This too, I suppose. It seems fitting, but I probably got it wrong. It's been a long time.