Moving, and Dreams of Home
Copyright 1994, by Bruce Garrett


Moving must be trauma.  No matter how much polish and finesse you bring to
the act, and I'm getting Real Good at it, relocating from one nest to
another apparently must inevitably disturb something deep inside of you.

When I moved here to Cockeysville, it was in a hurry.  I choose a place I
thought would meet my needs, but it hasn't worked out.  Last November, with
more then half a year to go on my lease, I decided to find another place.  I
spent four months apartment searching, ending up with a pile of brochures,
and finally choose a place, luckily within a quarter mile of my current
apartment, that is much, much nicer.

As a friend likes to put it, I'm a "cliff dweller".  Apartment living is
almost all I've ever known and I've come to realize that this makes my
concept of "neighborhood" slightly different from that of my tract housing
friends.  My childhood was spent among large clusters of big buildings full
of families and embracing courtyards, brick canyons, playgrounds, balconies
you could fling things off of, parking lots for playing in and basements
with passageways and secret (padlocked by the landlord) rooms waiting to be
explored.

I don't have recurring dreams, so much as recurring dreamscapes.  Not
surprisingly Village Square West, the apartment complex where I passed
through childhood into adolescence, and from there into adulthood, is one
of these.  Every so often in my dreams I am back in my old room, or
wandering amidst the buildings where I was a teenager and a young adult.
For the past couple weeks I've visited this place in my dreams at least
once every night.  It must be something to do emotionally with the
upcoming move, yet I feel great about moving to this new place; I've been
wearing the ears off of friends telling them all about how nice this new
apartment is.  But this is typical of what my nights have been like lately:

Some dreams introduce themselves smoothly, others just drop you into the
middle of things.  I am walking down a path in the woods which I know takes
me back to Village Square West.  It is a path I often used as a short cut
between home and the local convenience stores.  The afternoon is sunny and
clear and as I realize I am going home a big smile spreads across my face.
I am dressed in cutoffs and a light shirt and Chucks.  I seem to be anywhere
in my teens to my current age alternately and my hair changes from near
waist length to shoulder length at various times during the dream.  This
does not seem unusual.

Nor does it seem unusual that the apartment complex, when I get there, seems
as though it's partly under construction.  Half finished buildings sit side
by side with buildings familiar and buildings I barely recognize for all the
modifications made to them.

The building where I grew up has been extensively changed.  Once it's
architecture was ersatz colonial...now it's festooned with elements of
nearly every place I've ever lived, and some whose source I'm not certain
of.  I enter torn between excitement at seeing the new look of the
development and sadness that everything I grew up around has changed.
Before I walk up the stairs to the apartment I decide to check out the
basement.

What was nothing more then a dusky laundry room, a hallway and a trash room
has been overhauled dramatically.  As I walk past the rec room and gym I
notice the new laundry room vaguely resembles "Powders" in My Beautiful
Launderette.  In my new place I'll have a full size washer and dryer right
in the apartment.  I ponder whether or not I like this glitzy arraignment
better.  Then I notice the ones here don't have coin slots.  Further
examination reveals they are credit card operated.  There is also a key pad
for entering an ATM Card PIN.

This is not the first time this dream has started technobabbling.  During
the course of one dream visit to Village Square West, I discovered they had
installed terminals beside the doors to the building.  Somehow when I
laid eyes on them, I knew they were both for security and for tenant
E-Mail.  I was delighted.  Then I discovered to my horror that the
terminals were all running WordStar.  I stood in front of one desperately
racking my brain, trying to recall which WordStar command it was that
opens the door.  CONTROL-O...something...CONTROL-O...dang...dang...  Then I
woke up.

Now, I run up the stairs to our apartment, somehow remembering that instead
of being on the forth floor, our apartment is on the fifth, and what is
more there are now two more floors above us.  I wonder idly if they'd
planned for the extra load when they originally built the structure, and
why they added that floor beneath us, instead of simply putting another one
over top of us.  I enter my old home expecting that the view from the
balcony will be even nicer now that we're higher up.

The small entrance foyer is now a long hallway leading into the living room.
Mom and Dad are both sitting on the couch, and my Grandmother is sitting in
the rocker, quietly watching As the World Turns, her favorite soap.  I know
that Dad and Grandma are both many years dead but it is a strange quality of
dreaming that sometimes you can know two unconditionally contrary things and
accept them both as being true without noticing the contradiction.  Dad died
years ago...Dad is here with me now.  I give Mom a big hug and then walk over
to Dad as I haven't talked with him in a while and sit by his feet like I used
to when he was here with us, and I tell him excitedly about the new place in
Cockeysville I'm moving to, which is another dream incongruity since I'm also
practically bursting apart with joy about being home at Village Square West
again.  He congratulates me and asks how I'm doing at work.  Mom, having
already heard all of this, sits and quietly reads.

Someone knocks at the door, and I go to open it.  The long foyer has
shortened considerably when I wasn't looking.  When I open the door I see
George; we were boyfriends in the late 70s.  I've lost all contact with him
since.  George gives me a warm hug and a kiss and as I run my hands through
his hair he suggests we go for a walk; his smile makes me a little weak in
the knees.

As George and I leave the building I notice it has gone back to being four
stories again.  I take him by the hand and we walk to a place by the end of
one building where I know we can sit and be alone.  But as we approach where
that place should be I cannot find it.  Everything has changed.

We wander around...utterly unable to find our way.  We are not afraid,
George was always a very inwardly calm person, and being lost holds no
special terrors for me; I seldom feel like I'm lost so much as just
somewhere I haven't been before.  We decide we are just confused by all the
recent changes made to the apartment complex.  I troll for reference points
in the landscape but every one of these I find changes subtly from one
glance to the next.  Somehow this does not seem unusual.  I notice that all
the windows in all the apartments suddenly have dark heavy curtains drawn
over them.

Then I am laying in bed.  I am slowly waking.  I pull my blankets around me.
Dim early morning sunlight comes through the window blinds.  I get up,
tumbling as I usually do to the foot of the bed and sitting on the edge.
There is someone else in the room with me, standing in a corner of the room
and I cannot make out who it is; yet I am unfazed by this fact.  I sit
pondering the dream I just had.  Another Village Square West Dream.  Why are
they happening So often?  This, I think, is very interesting.  I walk over
to the window and open it.  I look down on the parking lot of Village Square
West.  I am in my old room again.  Wait a minute, I think, this isn't right.
I don't live here any more.

It gets weird when you realize you're dreaming.  I decide to wake up.  The
instant I think of being awake I can almost feel, a barrier between my
dreaming state and wakefulness.  In my mind I push at it.  It feels like
wading through warm waist deep water.

I stir...feeling myself slowly waking.  I open my eyes and see dim morning
sunlight in the window.  I roll down to the foot of the bed and sit up.
There is someone else in the room with me.  I cannot make out who it is but
somehow I feel that I know who it is.  Irritated, I point a finger at the
figure in the corner saying "Not this time, pal."  I walk over to the window
thinking, I AM Awake now...This IS the apartment at Cockeysville...  and
behold the parking lot at Village Square West.  It is a beautiful crisp
golden morning.  A warm peaceful remembrance fills my heart and something
inside of me throws up it's hands and surrenders and I begin to cry.
Like I haven't cried since Dad died.  The dream is so vivid my fingers can
feel the uneven paint job they did on the metal windowsill, before we moved
in, that the landlord never repainted until we moved out.

Resentfully I drag myself to wakefulness.  This time when I roll over in my
bed it's not Rockville any more.  It's early morning and the sun is just
coming up; time to get ready to go to work.  I get out of bed rubbing my
eyes.  Part of me is surprised to find them perfectly dry.  In the corner of
my room are all the boxes I've packed, holding the books that go on my
bedroom bookshelves.

Some dreams scare the dickens out of you; they slam you awake like a crash
dummy and leave you breathless and trembling with fear.  Some dreams delight
you; they leave you with a warm feeling that lasts all day and you feel good
to be alive.  Some dreams really show you that all your careful analysis of
your thoughts and feelings amounts to nothing more then mapping the waves on
a restless sea and you really don't understand very much at all about what
is going on in the silent darkness beneath them or what makes it all work.