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From stone to stone
Jul. 19th, 2022 06:32 amI dreamed I was following a wizard through a park across the street from an old stone church near my town's downtown. The church itself was low and a relic, some mainline Protestant denomination but it looked like something you'd see in the English countryside. The park across from it was a square with a raised area of grass circumscribed by stones of different sizes that, if you squinted right, almost formed a multilayered path around the park. The wizard would step with great deliberation from one stone to the next, and I followed him, along with a middle-aged woman that my wife apparently knew from a vegan hiking group in the area (in the waking world there exists no such group, to my knowledge, nor was this woman an actual person I know). She continually asked the wizard questions in an unhurried, smiling way, and the wizard, focused on the ritual at hand (for it was indeed some kind of ritual, the scope of which I didn't understand), politely demurred, himself smiling.
As we rounded one bend in the park, I realized we were surrounded by people and streets roped off from car traffic; there were art stands and the like, some type of craft fair, perhaps. No one paid attention to us.
*
I dreamed I was with my father in Italy. In the waking world we had never traveled there while he was alive, but now we were in some kind of rooftop cafe. It was hot, the air was suffused with light. A lone young couple dined at one of the tables al fresco. I was translating from Italian to English a long passage that was taped or otherwise attached to one wall of the cafe; the wall was high enough that I needed to be on a ladder to read the various pages, the content of which I cannot recall. I would hastily scribble notes into a pad as I clung to a ladder, with my father on the rungs below—not bracing the ladder, but also climbing it, and therefore making it even more unsteady.
My dad was not reading (he was mostly illiterate, although by the end of his life he had taught himself some English by reading the local newspaper and copying it by hand), so I asked him to stay off the ladder while I worked. A nice older lady I used to work with, the secretary, emerged from within the cafe, and I asked her if she would hang out with my dad while I continued the translation. They both went off inside the cafe, the secretary babbling pleasantly, and I got back on the ladder.
As we rounded one bend in the park, I realized we were surrounded by people and streets roped off from car traffic; there were art stands and the like, some type of craft fair, perhaps. No one paid attention to us.
*
I dreamed I was with my father in Italy. In the waking world we had never traveled there while he was alive, but now we were in some kind of rooftop cafe. It was hot, the air was suffused with light. A lone young couple dined at one of the tables al fresco. I was translating from Italian to English a long passage that was taped or otherwise attached to one wall of the cafe; the wall was high enough that I needed to be on a ladder to read the various pages, the content of which I cannot recall. I would hastily scribble notes into a pad as I clung to a ladder, with my father on the rungs below—not bracing the ladder, but also climbing it, and therefore making it even more unsteady.
My dad was not reading (he was mostly illiterate, although by the end of his life he had taught himself some English by reading the local newspaper and copying it by hand), so I asked him to stay off the ladder while I worked. A nice older lady I used to work with, the secretary, emerged from within the cafe, and I asked her if she would hang out with my dad while I continued the translation. They both went off inside the cafe, the secretary babbling pleasantly, and I got back on the ladder.
