I have been dreaming a lot lately. Dreaming of people and places I used to know. Jeff says there is nothing more boring than hearing other people's dreams (like sleepy dreams, not wishy dreams). But I disagree.

I keep showing up at my grandparents' old house or my second grade class room and old friends keep telling me about secret magic in ordinary places. It is strange and sad and then again neither. And when I wake up, I am always confused about my current life.

The saddest part about dreaming of past places is that they still exist separate from us. They have their own reality now. Like someone lives in my grandmother's old house. Right now. Someone is walking up the steps there and opening the door. Right now. My greatgrandmother's old house has been boarded up and abandoned for a long time. I dream about going there all the time. I get stuck there and it is empty except for the pinkish phone in the front room and the xmas tree and some discarded trash. The trash is always birth certificates. It is sad and weird how these places haunt us. While it is sad that places still exist, it is also amazing that we all just keep living our lives over the same space at different times. Like, I wish I could tear a tiny whole in reality and look at the lives in my apartment like 100 years ago. What would it be like? When those people moved out, did they think of it after? I guess I am just fascinated by place and time. The geography of our lives.

On the other hand, the best part of dreaming of people from our past is that they DO still exist separate from us. I always want to know what people I used to know are like now. That is prolly why I am always dreaming about them. Last night, I dreamt that Jeff and I went to some weird gaming conference and my old friend Dwayne was there. Something happened in the dream and we all had to escape from something. At the end of the ordeal, I remember hugging Dwayne, glad that we had gotten out. The hug made me realize that while he was the same Dwayne, he was this different person now. It was sad and lovely all at once. People pass through our lives so quickly. I imagine having a child will be like this. Watching them change every single day. And then one day, that 5 year old is gone and you have a 13 year old. But you never got the chance to mourn the 5 year old, ya know? One day you will hug them to see if they are the same person and they will be, but they won't be and it will be amazing.

I feel like I have a version in my mind of every person I have ever known. And when they are no longer in my life, that version gets stuck in my mind and shows up in my dreams. Like characters in a long running tv show. I suppose we all do this.

I don't know what this is all about. I think it is about how weird/cool it is that we collect these things in our minds and never let them go. People and places and even old versions of ourselves.