An ordinary Sunday, a strange dream, and a conversation I apparently owed myself.

Sundays are my favorite days

Yesterday ended with a restful night’s sleep after a day, I’d call fun and blessed. Sundays are my favorite days.

My wife and I woke up early and headed to a nice town called Newberry. It’s one of our favorite spots in New England, about a thirty-minute drive from where we live. It’s a tiny mill town with little houses, a lovely lake view, and a handful of coffee shops that we’ve visited over and over again.

I personally don’t have much appreciation for good coffee, but my wife does. A new coffee shop had recently opened in town, and, of course, she needed her coffee itch scratched. So, we headed over and got ourselves coffee that, to me, tasted no different from any other coffee we’ve had so far, except the one I had I had in Yemen.

“How do you rate the coffee?” I asked.

“The bagel isn’t as good as the other place. They don’t make it in-house,” she replied.

That’s pretty much every food-related conversation we ever have. Nothing unusual. It follows the same arc: excitement, disappointment, and then the realization that it doesn’t matter after all.

On to the next thing

We soon forgot about our unremarkable coffee experience and found a nearby trail that would be easy enough for my wife, who is eight months pregnant. The trail was beautiful and peaceful, crowded only with trees. We walked for about thirty minutes and only had to exchange greetings with one couple and a few solo hikers.

We didn’t talk much. The whole conversation went something like this:

“What are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“But really, what are you thinking about?”

“Just wondering why you’re wondering about what I’m wondering about.”

Our solitude was interrupted by falling acorns. My wife worried that a hit on the head might send us to the hospital, while I kept an eye on the chipmunks and squirrels and hoped to spot a deer.

We headed back to the car and then home. I dropped my wife off and went to the workshop, a nice community woodshop where I spent a few hours having fun with wood.

It’s bedtime

By ten, I was spent and ready for bed. Of course, bedtime meant another hour of scrolling through random videos on YouTube until I drifted off. But sometimes falling asleep feels like waking up somewhere else, wandering into another dimension or even another life. Especially when the dream feels less like a brief interruption and more like a place where you’ve been living all along.

Once I’d crossed into that other dimension of my life, I found myself climbing a short flight of stairs and stepping into an office. A man in his mid-sixties, mostly gray and smoking a cigarette, sat before me. He looked me straight in the eye as he spoke, every sentence charged with emotion and frustration.

He didn’t give me a chance to speak. Instead, he went straight into the intricate details of something that had been bothering me for a while, explaining exactly why it shouldn’t bother me anymore.

It wasn’t the only dream I had that night, but it was the one that stayed with me.

I meet all sorts of people in my dreams. Some have familiar faces; others are strangers. Usually, who they are matters less than the idea or situation they seem to represent. But this guy felt different. He wasn’t just there to play a part.

He felt like my subconscious, finally fed up with me, calling me into a meeting I’d never agreed to attend. Apparently, my conscious mind had dragged this matter out long enough, and he intended to settle it once and for all.

Which brings me back to a question I keep asking myself: how much should we make of our dreams? Are they random fragments, or is the brain sorting through memories and working through things we haven’t quite settled while awake? And if that’s all they are, does that make them any less meaningful?

Then there’s the possibility I can’t quite leave alone: could there be something more to them? Could something unfolding entirely within the boundaries of our skull somehow connect us to a world beyond it? I tend to think that man was my subconscious trying to get through to me. But part of me still wonders who, or what, I met in that office.