06/21/04
Mystery Bench

Yesterday (Sunday morning, when dozing in the tub) I had this brief "snippet" of a dream image that for all I know could have been just a waking mental image, though the way in which it came up on me, without me actively thinking it through, leads me to believe it was in fact a dream snippet had while I was not fully asleep. It was very short and rather strange.

In it I was merely standing beside the garage with Ma; it was overcast, and weedy and overgrown and filled with junk over there just like it is in real life, only the raspberry bushes didn't seem to be in the way, and it was messy in more of an overgrown junkpile kind of way than in the really crappy way it is in real life. In short, it had almost a charm to it, in my dream, whereas in real life it's just messy. In the dream there was either a concrete bench sitting beside the garage, or else it had just been removed. I think it was still there. It looked like cinderblock, pitted and with a corner of it broken off and such. It was scrawled over with crayon in spots, and I knew I'd made drawings on it when I was just a little child. I seem to remember that I had taken note of something or written something I had considered important on it at some distant point, too. Ma and I were looking at it and I believe she mentioned how she was going to throw it away.

I looked at her, feeling wistful and upset, and either asked that she please leave it, because I had fond memories of it, or else let me know before she tossed it because I wanted to see what I'd written on it. Maybe I asked that it simply be moved elsewhere. She sort of looked at me as if wondering why I thought so much of a broken old bench.

It was as if I awoke then--I'm pretty sure I did--and I seemed to have a memory that this bench had existed by the garage, long ago, and Ma had removed it somewhere else. It was a feeling of, "Oh, that old bench. I completely forgot about that thing." Then I woke up all the way and puzzled over this, because, there has never been any such bench that I recall. The closest thing we've had beside the garage in that area is real cinderblocks...and although they are chipped and broken, I never wrote on them in crayon, nor took note of anything important on them.

What bothers me is that the vague image of the crayon-scrawled concrete bench, and then the pseudo "memory" of it actually having been there in the past, really gave me a waking feeling of deja vu, like the bench really WAS there at some point, though I have no reason to believe it ever was. :/



2004 Dreams
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