maboroshi

Good morning, everybody.

I thought I'd share the passage below, since it relates to both dreaming and New Year's Eve. The passage is from Charles Dickens' story "The Chimes."

The plot device of "The Chimes" is similar to that of "A Christmas Carol": a ghost leads a man, Toby Veck, into the future, so that he can see the effects of the choices he makes in the present. The effects are terrible. So Toby mends his ways and lives happily ever after.

This quote comes from the end of the book.

"Had Trotty dreamed? Or, are his joys and sorrows, and the actors in them, but a dream; himself a dream; the teller of this tale a dreamer, waking but now? If it be so, O listener, dear to him in all his visions, try to bear in mind the stern realities from which these shadows come; and in your sphere, none is too wide, and none too limited for such an end -- endeavour to correct, improve, and soften them. So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you! So may each year be happier than the last, and not the meanest of our brethren or sisterhood debarred their rightful share, in what our Great Creator formed them to enjoy."

Dream #1

I was in a laundromat which may have been a part of a department store or a K-Mart. I was at the far end of one of the aisles of machines. I think the machines were dryers, though they looked like washers. There were laundry carts cluttering all the way up the aisle.

Two guys were also in the aisle. I felt like they were my friends. They may also have been working at the laundromat. They were talking to each other without really regarding me. They were talking about some guy, who I eventually realized was me.

The guys were talking about how the guy was really conceited. They said that you could never tell this guy anything. And he'd never admit he was wrong. It made the atmosphere tense around him all the time. But he wasn't really so impressive that he should make people feel that way.

I thought, Wow. Is that really the way people feel about me? I realized I should really start watching how I act toward people. I thought I'd start right away, by treating my two friends nicely. I may have tried to say something nice to my friends.

But now I was suddenly sitting at a desk outside the aisles of laundry machines. I was looking at my phone. I was texting back and forth between my sister and my friend H.

I think I was just having a normal conversation with H. But my sister had gone into the hospital for something. So I was texting with her to find out how everything had gone.

But somebody, either H or my sister, was sitting at the near end of another aisle of laundry machines off to my right. The person was sitting with another couple of people, probably kids. They were all on the floor, maybe buried in coats.

I hadn't heard from my sister in a while. I wasn't getting worried about her health, necessarily. But I was worried that I'd said something to offend her, so that she'd stopped texting me and now wouldn't let me know if things were okay.

But I now got a text from my sister. It said something like, "Well, the doctor sent me and J (my brother-in-law) over to the pharmacy. So when I get my stuff from the pharmacy I'll be able to tell you what my problem was."

It was like the doctor knew the problem, but didn't tell my sister what it was. So my sister had to infer the problem from whatever kind of medicine she got.

The text did, however, seem to have a bit of a feeling of annoyance with me. So I tried to think of how I could be less annoying.

At the same time that I read the text, the person sitting on the floor off to my right was also speaking to me. It was like my sister was right there, telling me everything she had texted me.