I Know It's You

I’ve written before about some of the strangenesses of dreams, and I’m not done dreaming. If only they weren’t so hard to remember I might have even more to say. I’ve tried keeping a dream journal a few times, but it is a difficult habit. It requires time at a part of the day when that is at a premium. During the week I don’t have the luxury of staying in the dark a while—work calls. And the weekend is too infrequent and irregular to establish a habit.

In any case, I had a dream about a good friend of mine last night. Or I think I did. In truth, from as much as I can remember, it was one of those dreams where you are in a certain place with certain people, and you know this not because you recognize any particular feature, a face, a voice, the surroundings, but simply because it is the premise of the dream. It is a certainty based on absolutely nothing, but you can’t see it until you wake. And then maybe you wonder how certain you can be that you are awake and where you seem to be…

And now I wonder a little about how well I actually know this friend. I have met them exactly once, several years ago. I keep in touch through the internet and the mail¹, but even that is not as frequent as I would like. Many of my conversations with them have not directly been about each other but simply discussion of a shared interest. You do learn plenty about a person that way, but obliquely, slowly, and patchily. And then in general (since we’re already overthinking here) what is “knowing someone” and how do we know when we are doing it? Do I know my own parents? My siblings? But that’s neither here nor there, perhaps in another post.

Sometimes I marvel that the existence of dreams is so readily accepted as a phenomenon. That I can describe the strange things that I see and feel at night and people nod and say that it is relatable.