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.